m jf!m^ 



THE 



TRIP TO ENGLAND. 



BY 



WILLIAM WINTER. 



^«orxi) fibilion, ^tbiscii anir €nlargeir. 



With Illustrations by Joseph Jefferson. 



" My heart is filled with fond yet melancholy ejyiotions ; 
and still I linger, and still, like a child leaving ike 
venerable abodes of his forefathers, I turn to breathe 
forth a filial benediction : Peace be within thy ivalls, 
O England! and plentcoiisjiess within thy palaces; 
for my brethren and my compattions' sake, I will now 
say. Peace be within ^Af^/"— WASHINGTON IRVING. 



BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 



1 88 I. i!f : 




ITHE LIBRARY I 
tor CONGRESS 

IWAfHlHOTOr 



x" 



Copyright 1878 and 1880, 
By William Winter. 

All Rights Reserved, 



University Press : 
^okn Wilson and Son, Cambridge, 



^ 



TO 

WHIT EL AW REID, 

WITH ESTEEM FOR HIS PUBLIC CAREER, 

WITH HONOUR FOR HIS PURE CHARACTER, 

AND WITH AFFECTIONATE FRIENDSHIP, 

THIS MEMORIAL 

OF LOVELY SCENES AND HAPPY MOMENTS 
IS DEDICATED 

BY 
THE AUTHOR. 



* 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. The Voyage u 



II. The Beauty of England i 



9 



III. Rambles in London 30 

IV. A Visit to Windsor 39 

V. The Palace of Westminster 48 

VI. Warwick and Kenilworth 57 

VII. Stratford-on-Avon 64 

VIII. A Glimpse of France 75 

IX. English Home Sentiment 84 

X. London Nooks and Corners 89 

XI. The Tower and the Byron Memorial 98 
XII. Westminster Abbey 106 

XIII. The Home of Shakespeare 119 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Heltotypes, from Sketches by Joseph Jefferson. 

I. Windsor Castle. ^' 

II. Windsor Park. 

III. The Victoria Tower, at Westminster. 

IV. The Thames from Richmond. H^ 
V. The Avenue at Guy's Cliff. 

VI. Warwick Castle on the Avon. 

VII. The Road to Stratford. 

VIII. Distant View of Kenilworth. 

IX. Rouen. 

X. A Green Lane. 



* 



PREFACE. 

'^T^HE letters that form this volume were first 
-^ published in the New-York Tribune^ 
from which journal they are now reprinted, 
with a few changes and additions. Their 
writer passed ten weeks of the summer of 1877 in 
England and France^ where he met with a great 
and smprisifig kindness^ and where he saw many 
beautiful and me7norable things. These letters 
were written because he wished to co7nmemorate — ■ 
however inadequately — a delightful experience : 
and they are now presettted in this form, at the 
kind request of many persons — strangers as well 
as friends — to whom, and to all other readers, it 
is hoped they may bring an ho2ir of peaceful and 
pleasant reverie. 

W. W. 
Neiv-York, November IGth, 1878. 



^ 



NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

"/ ^HE text of this volume has been revised, for 
the present edition, by the correction of one 
or two errors, and by the hnprove7nent of a few 
phrases. A chapter also has been added, con- 
taining a paper on The Home of Shakespeare, 
written by uie for Harper's Magazine, and first 
published in May, 1879, to record, for the A merzca?i 
public^ the dedication of the Shakespeare Memorial, 
at Stratford. That paper was efnbellished, in the 
Magazine, with beautifil illustratioiis, — eqtcally 
poetical and truthful, — by Edward A. Abbey. 
A repetition of somewhat familiar facts ivas found 
unavoidable by the writer, but perhaps this will 
not be found tedious by the reader. 

W. W. 

Fort Hill, New Brighton, S, I. 
June 21, i8So. 



* 



THE TRIP TO ENGLAND. 



*h 



This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, 

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 

This other Eden, demi-pa7'fldise, 

This fo7'tr ess built by nature for herself 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 

This land of sucJi dear souls, this dear, dear land, 

Dear for her reputation through the zvorld! 

Shakespeare. 



^ 



THE TRIP TO ENGLAND. 



I. 



THE VOYAGE. 



THE coast line recedes and disappears, and 
night comes down upon the ocean. Into 
what dangers will the great ship plunge ? Through 
what mysterious waste of waters will she make her 
viewless path ? The black waves roll up around 
her. The strong blast fills her sails and whistles 
through her creaking cordage. Overhead the 
stars shine dimly amidst the driving clouds. Mist 
and gloom close in the dubious prospect, and a 
strange sadness settles upon the heart of the 
voyager — who has left his home behind, and who 
now seeks, for the first time, the land, the homes, 
and the manners of the strano:er. Thoughts and 



12 The Trip to Engla^id. 

images of the past crowd thick upon his remem- 
brance. The faces of absent friends rise up before 
him, whom, perhaps, he is destined never more 
to behold. He sees their smiles ; he hears their 
voices ; he fancies them by familiar hearth-stones, 
in the light of the evening lamps. They are very 
far away now ; and already it seems months in- 
stead of hours since the parting moment. Vain 
now the pang of regret for misunderstandings, 
unkindness, neglect ; for golden moments slighted, 
and gentle courtesies left undone. He is alone 
upon the wild sea — all the more alone because 
surrounded with new faces of unknown compan- 
ions — and the best he can do is to seek his lonely 
pillow, and lie down with a prayer in his heart and 
on his lips. Never before did he so clearly know 
— never again will he so deeply feel — the uncer- 
tainty of human life and the weakness of human 
nature. Yet, as he notes the rush and throb of 
the vast ship, and the noise of the breaking waves 
around her, and thinks of the mighty deep be- 
neath, and the broad and melancholy expanse that 
stretches away on every side, he cannot miss the 
impression — grand, noble, and thrilHng — of hu- 
man courage, skill, and power. For this ship is 
the centre of a splendid conflict. Man and the ele- 
ments are here at war ; and man makes conquest 
of the elements by using them as weapons against 
themselves. Strong and brilliant, the head-hght 
streams over the boiling surges. Lanthorns gleam 



The Voyage. 13 

in the tops. Dark figures keep watch upon the 
prow. The officer of the night is at liis- post 
upon the bridge. Let danger threaten howso- 
ever it may, it cannot come unawares ; it cannot 
subdue, without a tremendous struggle, the brave 
minds and hardy bodies that are here arrayed to 
meet it. With this thought, perhaps, the weary 
voyager sinks to sleep ; and this is his first night 
at sea. 

There is no tediousness of soh'tude to him who 
has within himself resources of thought and dream, 
the i^leasures and pains of memory, the bliss and 
the torture of imagination. It is best to have few 
acquaintances — or none at all — on shipboard. 
Human companionship, at some times (and this 
is one of them), distracts by its pettiness. The 
voyager should yield himself to nature, now, and 
meet his own soul face to face. The routine of 
every-day life is commonplace enough, equally 
upon sea and land. But the ocean is a continual 
pageant, filling and soothing the mind with un- 
speakable peace. Never, in even the grandest 
words of poetry, was the grandeur of the sea ex- 
pressed. Its vastness, its freedom, its joy, and its 
beauty overwhelm the mind. All things else seem 
puny and momentary beside the life which by 
this immense creation is unfolded and inspired. 
Sometimes it shines in the sun, a wilderness of 
.shimmering silver. Sometimes its long waves are 
black, smooth, glittering, and dangerous. Some- 



14 The Trip to Efigla?id. 

times it seems instinct with a superb wrath, and 
its huge masses rise, and clash together, and break 
into crests of foam. Sometimes it is grey and 
quiet, as if in a sullen sleep. Sometimes the white 
mist broods upon it, and deepens the sense of 
awful mystery by which it is forever enwrapped. 
At night, its surging billows are furrowed with 
long streaks of phosphorescent fire ; or, it may be, 
the waves roll gently, under the soft light of stars ; 
or all the waste is dim, save where, beneath the 
moon, a glorious pathway, broadening out to the 
far horizon, allures and points to heaven. One of 
the most exquisite delights of the voyage, whether 
by day or night, is to lie upon the deck, in some 
secluded spot, and look up at the tall, tapering 
spars as they sway with the motion of the ship, 
while over them the white clouds float, in ever- 
changing shapes, or the starry constellations drift, 
in their eternal march. No need now of books, or 
newspapers, or talk ! The eyes are fed by every 
object they behold. The great ship, with all her 
white wings spread, careening like a tiny sail-boat, 
dips and rises, with sinuous, stately grace. The 
clank of her engines — fit type of steadfast industry 
and purpose — goes steadily on. The song of the 
sailors — " Give me some time to blow the man 
down " — rises in cheery melody, full of auda- 
cious, light-hearted thoughtlessness, and strangely 
tinged with the romance of the sea. P^ar out 
toward the horizon a school of whales come sport- 



The Voyage. 15 

ing and spouting along. At once, out of the 
distant bank of cloud and mist, a little vessel 
springs into view, and with short, jerking move- 
ment — tilting up and down like the miniature 
barque upon an old Dutch clock — dances across 
the vista and vanishes into space. Soon a tempest 
bursts upon the calm ; and then, safe-housed from 
the fierce blast and blinding rain, the voyager 
exults over the stern battle of winds and waters, 
and the stalwart, undaunted strength with which 
his ship bears down the furious floods and stems 
the gale. By and by a quiet hour is given, when, 
met together with all the companions of his jour- 
ney, he stands in the hushed cabin, and hears the 
voice of prayer and the hymn of praise ; and, in the 
pauses, a gentle ripple of waves against the ship, 
which now rocks lazily upon the quiet deep — and, 
ever and anon, as she dips, he can discern through 
her open ports the shining sea, and the wheeling 
and circling gulls that have come out to welcome 
her to the shores of the Old World. 

The present writer, when first he saw the dis- 
tant and dim coast of Britain, felt with a sense of 
forlorn loneliness, that he was a stranger ; but, 
when last he saw that coast, he beheld it through 
a mist of tears, and knew that he had parted from 
many cherished friends, from many of the gentlest 
men and women upon the earth, and from a land 
henceforth as dear to him as his own. England 
is a country which to see is to love. As you draw 



1 6 The Trip to Eii gland. 

near to her shores you are pleased, at once, with 
the air of careless Jfinish and negligent grace 
which everywhere overhangs the prospect. The 
o^rim, wind-beaten hills of Ireland have first been 
passed — hills crowned, here and there, with dark, 
fierce towers that look like strongholds of an- 
cient bandit chiefs, and cleft by dim valleys that 
seem to promise endless mystery and romance, 
hid in their sombre depths. Passed also is white 
Oueenstown, with its lovely little bay, its circle 
of green hill-sides, and its valiant fort ; and pictur- 
esque Fastnet, with its gaily painted tower, has 
long; been left behind. It is off the noble crao;s 
of Holyhead that the voyager first observes with 
what a deft skill the hand of art has here moulded 
nature's luxuriance into forms of seeming chance- 
born beauty ; and from that hour, wherever in 
rural England the footsteps of the pilgrim may 
roam, he will behold nothing but gentle rustic 
adornment, that has grown with the grass and 
the roses — greener grass and redder roses than 
ever we see in -our Western World! In the 
English nature a love of the beautiful is sponta- 
neous ; and the operation of it is as effortless as 
the blowing of the summer wind. Portions of 
English cities, indeed, are hard, and harsh, and 
coarse enough to suit the most utilitarian taste ; 
yet, even in these regions of dreary monotony, 
the national love of flowers will find expression, 
and the people, without being aware of it, will, in 



The Voyage. ly 

many odd little ways, beautify .their homes and 
make their surroundings pictorial, at least to stran- 
ger eyes. There is a tone of rest and home-like 
comfort even in murky Liverpool ; and great mag- 
nificence is there — as well of architecture and opu- 
lent living as of enterprize and action. " Towered 
cities " and " the busy hum of men," however, 
are soon left behind by the wise traveller in Eng- 
land. A time will come for these ; but in his first 
sojourn there he soon discovers the two things 
which are utterly to absorb him — which can- 
not disappoint — and which are the fulfilment of 
all his dreams, and the reward of all his patience 
and labour: These things are — the rustic love- 
liness of the land, and the charm of its always vital 
and splendid antiquity. The green lanes, the 
thatch-roof cottages, the meadows glorious with 
wild flowers, the little churches covered with dark- 
green ivy, the Tudor fronts festooned with roses, 
the devious foot-paths that wind across wild heaths 
and long and lonesome fields, the narrow, shining 
rivers, brimful to their banks, and crossed here 
and there with grey and moss-grown bridges, the 
stately elms, whose low-hanging branches droop 
over a turf of emerald velvet, the gnarled beech- 
trees "■ that wreathe their old, fantastic roots so 
high," the rooks that caw and circle in the air, 
the sweet winds that blow from fragrant woods, the 
sheep and the deer that rest in shady places, the 
pretty children who cluster round the porches of 



1 8 The Trip to England. 

their cleanly, cosey homes, and peep at the way- 
farer as he passes, the numerous and often bril- 
liant birds that at times fill the air with music, the 
brief, light, pleasant rains that ever and anon 
refresh the landscape — these are some of the 
every-day joys of rural England ; and these are 
wrapped in a chmate that makes life one serene 
ecstacy. Meantime, in rich valleys or on verdant 
slopes, a thousand old castles and monasteries, 
ruined or half in ruins, allure the pilgrim's gaze, 
inspire his imagination, arouse his memory, and 
fill his mind. The best romance of the past and 
the best reality of the present are his banquet 
now ; and nothing is wanting to the perfection of 
the feast. I thought that life could have but few 
moments of happiness in store for me like the 
moment — never to be forgotten ! — when, in the 
heart of London, on a perfect June day, I lay upon 
the grass in the old Green Park, and, for the first 
time, looked up to the towers of Westminster 
Abbey. 




n. 



THE BEAUTY OF ENGLAND. 



T ONDON, July 7th, 1877. — It is not strange 
that Englishmen should be — as certainly they 
are — passionate lovers of their country ; for their 
country is, almost beyond parallel, peaceful, gentle 
and beautiful. Even in this vast city, where prac- 
tical life asserts itself with such prodigious force, 
the stranger is impressed, in every direction, with 
a sentiment of repose and peace. This sentiment 
seems to proceed in part from the antiquity of the 
social system here established, and in part from 
the affectionate nature of the English people. Here 
are finished towns, rural regions thoroughly culti- 
vated and exquisitely adorned ; ancient architec- 
ture, crumbling in slow decay ; and a soil so rich 



20 The Trip to England. 

and pure that even in its idlest mood it lights itself 
up with flowers, just as the face of a sleeping child 
lights itself up with smiles. Here, also, are soft 
and kindly manners, settled principles, good laws, 
wise customs — wise, because rooted in the univer- 
sal attributes of human nature ; and, above all, 
here is the practice of trying to hve in a happy 
condition, instead of trying to make a noise about 
it. Here, accordingly, life is soothed and hallowed 
with the comfortable, genial, loving spirit of home. 
It would, doubtless, be easily possible to come 
into contact here with absurd forms and pernicious 
abuses, to observe absurd individuals, and to trace 
out veins of sordid selfishness and of evil and sor- 
row. But the things that first and most deeply im- 
press the fresh observer of England and Enghsh 
society are their potential, manifold, and abundant 
sources of beauty, refinement, and peace. There 
are, of course, grumblers. Mention has been made 
of a person who, even in heaven, would complain 
that his cloud was damp and his halo a mis-fit. We 
cannot have perfection ; but, the man who could 
not be happy in England — in so far, at least, as 
happiness depends upon external objects and influ- 
ences — could not reasonably expect to be happy 
anywhere. 

Letters tell me that New- York is hot. The 
statement cannot be doubted by one who remem- 
bers what July was, last year, in that city. If this 
July resembles its departed brother, you are all in- 



The Beauty of England. 2 1 

deed, the proper objects of pity. Here the weather 
is Hterally blissfuL It behaved a htde shabbily 
during the first days of June ; but since then it has 
been delightful. Summer heat is perceptible for 
an hour or two each day, but, to the American 
sense it is trivial, and it causes no discomfort. 
Garments that we in New- York should wear in 
October are quite suitable for use in the London 
July, and at night we sleep under blankets, and 
could not dispense with them. Fog has refrained ; 
though it is understood to be lurking in the Irish 
Sea and the British Channel, and waiting for No- 
vember, when it will drift into town and grime all 
the new paint on the London houses. Meantime, 
the sky is softly blue, and full of magnificent bronze 
clouds ; the air is cool, and, in the environs of the 
city, is fragrant with the scent of new-mown hay; 
and the grass and trees in the parks — those copi- 
ous and splendid lungs of London — are green, 
dewy, sweet, and beautiful. 

Persons " to the manner born " were lately call- 
ing the season " backward," and they went so far 
as to grumble at the hawthorn, as being less bril- 
liant than in former seasons. But, in fact, to the 
unfamiliar sense, this bush of odourous coral has 
been delicious. You know it, doubtless, as one of 
the sweetest beauties of rural England. It de- 
serves its reputation. We have nothing compar- 
able with it in northern America, unless, perhaps, 
it be the elder, of our wild woods ; and even that, 



22 The Trip to Ejigiand. 

with all its fragrance, lacks equal charm of colour. 
They use the hawthorn, or some kindred shrub, for 
hedges, in this country, and hence their fields are 
seldom disfigured with fences. As you ride through 
the land, you see miles and miles of meadow, tra- 
versed by these green and blooming hedge-rows — 
which give the country a charm quite incommuni- 
cable in words. The green of the fohage — en- 
riched by an uncommonly humid air, and burnished 
by the sun — is just now in perfection, while the 
flowers are out in such abundance that the whole 
realm is one glowing pageant. I saw the other day, 
near Oxford, on the crest of a hill, a single patch of 
at least three thousand square yards of scarlet pop- 
pies. You can imagine what a glorious dash of 
colour that was, in a green landscape lit by the after- 
noon sun. Nobody could help loving a land that 
woos him with such beauty. 

English flowers, it must often have been noticed, 
are exceptional for substance and pomp. The 
roses, in particular — though many of them, it 
should be said, are of French breeds — surpass all 
others. It may seem an extravagance to say, but 
it is certainly true, that these rich, firm, brilliant 
flowers affect you like creatures of flesh and blood. 
They are, in this respect, only to be described as 
like nothing in the world so much as the bright lips 
and blushing cheeks of the handsome English wo- 
men who walk among them and vie with them in 
health and loveliness. It is easy to perceive the 



The Beauty of England. 23 

source of those elements of warmth and sumptuous- 
ness which are so conspicuous in the results of 
English taste. This. a land of flowers. Even in ^ f ] 
the busiest parts of London the people decorate J 

their houses with them, and set the sombre, fog- 
grimed fronts ablaze with scarlet and gold. These 
are the prevalent colours (so radically such that they 
have become national), and, when placed against the 
black tint with which this cHmate stains the build- 
ings, they have the advantage of a vivid contrast 
which much augments their splendour. All Lon- 
don wears "a suit of sables," variegated with a 
tracery of white, like lace upon a pall. In some 
instances the effect is splendidly pompous. There 
cannot be a grander artificial object in the world 
than the front of St. Paul's Cathedral, which is 
especially notable for this mysterious blending of 
light and shade. It is to be deplored that a climate 
which can thus beautify should also destroy ; but 
there can be no doubt that the stones of England are 
steadily defaced by the action of the moist atmos- 
phere. Already the delicate carvings on the Palace 
of Westminster are beginning to crumble. And 
yet, if one might judge the climate by this glittering 
July, England is a land of sunshine as well as of 
flowers. Light comes before three o'clock in the 
morning, and it lasts, through a dreamy and lovely 
"gloaming," till nearly ten o'clock at night. The 
morning sky is usually light blue, dappled with 
slate-coloured clouds. A few large stars are visible 



24 The Trip to England. 

then, lingering to outface the dawn. Cool winds 
whisper, and presently they rouse the great, sleepy, 
old elms ; and then the rooks — which are the low 
comedians of the air, in this region — begin to grum- 
ble ; and then the sun leaps above the horizon, and 
we sweep into a day of golden, breezy cheerfulness 
and comfort, the Hke of which is rarely or never 
known in New-York, between June and October. 
Sometimes the whole twenty-four hours have drifted 
past, as if in a dream of light, and fragrance, and 
music. In a recent moonlight time there was scarce 
any darkness at all ; and more than once or twice 
I have lain awake all night — within a few miles of 
Charing Cross — listening to the twitter of small 
birds and the song of a nightingale, which is like 
the lapse and fall of silver water. It used to be 
dijfficult to understand why the London season 
should begin in May and last through most of the 
summer; it is not. difficult to understand the cus- 
tom now. 

The season is at its height. Parliament is in 
session. Both of the opera houses are open. Hyde 
Park is alive with riders and drivers. Thea- 
tres are alert and competitive. The clubs are 
thronged. The Briton is giving his serious atten- 
tion to dinner. The garden party makes itself 
heard in the land. The excursionist is more in- 
dustrious than even the Colorado beetle. Some- 
thing happens every day, to interest and amuse 
everybody. Apart from the gay incidents of the 



The Beauty of England. 25 

season, however, there is so much else to be seen 
in London that the pilgrim scarcely knows where 
to choose, and certainly is perplexed by what Dr. 
Johnson called " the multiplicity of agreeable con- 
sciousness." One spot, to which I have many 
times been drawn, and which the mention of Dr. 
Johnson instantly calls to mind, is the wonderously 
impressive place in Westminster Abbey, where 
that great man's ashes are buried. Side by side, 
under the pavement of the Abbey, within a few 
feet of earth, sleep Johnson, Garrick, Sheridan, 
Henderson, Dickens, Cumberland, and Handel. 
Garrick's w^fe is buried in the same grave with 
her husband. Close by, some brass letters on a 
little slab in the pavement disclose the last resting- 
place of Thomas Campbell. Not far off is the 
body of Macaulay ; while many a stroller through 
the nave treads upon the grave-stone of that 
astonishing old man, Thomas Parr, who lived in 
the reigns of nine princes (1483-1635), and 
reached the great age of 152. All parts of West- 
minster Abbey impress the reverential mind. It 
is an experience very strange and full of awe, 
for instance, suddenly to find your steps upon the 
sepulchres of such illustrious men as Burke, Pitt, 
Fox, and Grattan ; and you come, with a thrill of 
more than surprise, upon such still fresh anti- 
quity as the grave of the hapless Anne Neville, who 
was the daughter of Warwick and the Oueen of 
Richard the Tliird. But no single spot in the great 



26 The Trip to England. 

cathedral can so enthrall the imagination as 
that strip of storied stone beneath which Garrick, 
Johnson, Sheridan, Dickens, Macaulay, and Han- 
del sleep, side by side. This writer, when lately 
he visited the Abbey, found a chair upon the 
grave of Johnson, and sat down there to rest 
and muse. The letters on the stone are fast 
wearing away ; but the memory of this sturdy 
champion of thought can never perish, as long 
as the votaries of literature love their art, and 
honour the valiant genius which battled — through 
hunger, toil, and contumely — for its dignity and 
renown. It was a tender and right feeling which 
prompted the burial of Johnson close beside 
Garrick. They set out together to seek their 
fortunes in the great city. They went through 
privation and trial hand in hand. Each found 
glory in a different way ; and, although parted 
afterward by the currents of fame and wealth, they 
were never sundered in affection. It was fit they 
should at last find their rest together, under the 
most glorious roof that greets the skies of England. 
Fortune gave me a good first day at the Tower 
of London. The sky lowered. The air was very 
cold. The wind blew with angry gusts. The rain 
fell, now and then, in a chill drizzle. The river was 
dark and sullen. If the spirits of the dead come 
back to haunt any place, they surely come back 
to haunt this one ; and this was a day for their 
presence. One dark ghost seemed near, at every 



The Beauty of England. 27 

step — the baleful shade of the grim Duke of Glos- 
ter. The little room in which the princes are said 
to have been murdered, by his command, was shown, 
and the oratory where King Henry the Sixth is 
supposed to have met his bloody death, and the 
council chamber in which Richard — after listen- 
ing, in an ambush behind the arras — denounced 
the wretched Hastings. This latter place is now 
used as an armoury ; but the same ceiling covers it 
which echoed the bitter invective of Gloster, and 
the rude clamour of his soldiers, when their fright- 
ened victim was plucked forth and dragged down 
stairs, to be beheaded on a stick of wood in the 
court-yard. The Tower is a place for such deeds, 
and you almost wonder that they do not happen 
still, in its gloomy chambers. The room in which 
the princes were killed is particularly murderous 
in aspect. It is an inner room, small and dark. 
A barred window in one of its walls fronts a 
window on the other side of the passage by which 
you approach it. This window is but a few feet 
from the floor, and perhaps the murderers paused 
to look through it, as they went to their hellish 
work upon the poor children of King Edward. 
The entrance was pointed out to a secret passage 
by which this apartment could be approached from 
the foot of the Tower. In one gloomy stone 
chamber the crown jewels are exhibited, in a large 
glass case. There is a crown here, of velvet and 
gold, which was made for poor Anne Boleyn. 



28 The Trip to England. 

You may pass across the court-yard and pause on 
the spot where this miserable woman was beheaded, 
and you may walk thence over the ground that 
her last trembling footsteps traversed, to the round 
tower in which, at the last, she lived. Her grave 
is in the chancel of a little antique church, close 
by. I saw the cell of Raleigh, and that direful 
chamber which is scrawled all over with the names 
and emblems of prisoners who therein suffered 
confinement and lingering agony, nearly always 
ending in death ; but I saw no sadder place than 
Anne Boleyn's tower. It seemed in the strangest 
way eloquent of mute suffering. It seemed to 
exhale grief and to plead for love and pity. Yet — 
what woman ever had greater love than was lavished 
on her ! And what woman ever trampled more 
royally and wickedly upon human hearts ! It was 
to Anne Boleyn that Sir Thomas Wyatt addressed 
those passionate lines — so fraught with her own 
character as well as her lover's idolatry ! — which, 
once read, can never be forgotten : 

" Forget not yet the tried intent 
' Of such a truth as 1 have meant ; 
My great travail so gladly spent 
Forget not yet ! 

" Forget not yet when first began 
The weary life, ye know since when ; 
The suit, the service, none tell can, 
Forget not yet ! 



The Beauty of England. 29 

** Forget not yet the great assaj's; 
The cruel wrong, the scornful ways, 
The painful patience in delays, 
Forget not yet ! 



" Forget not, oh, forget not this ! 
How long ago hath been, and is, 
The mind that never meant amiss, 
Forget not yet ! 

" Forget not then thine own approved. 
The which so long hath thee so loved, 
Whose steadfast faith yet never moved, 
Forget not this ! " 




III. 



RAMBLES IN LONDON. 



ALL old cities get rich in association, as a matter 
of course, and whether they will or no ; but 
. London, by reason of its great extent, as well as its 
great antiquity, is richer in association than any mod- 
ern place on earth. The stranger scarcely takes a 
step without encountering some new object of inter- 
est. The walk along the Strand and Fleet street, in 
particular, is continually on storied ground. Old 
Temple Bar still stands (July, 1877), though " totter- 
ing to its fall," and marks the boundary between the 
two streets. The statues of Charles the First and 
Charles the Second on its western front, would be re- 
markable anywhere, as characteristic portraits. You 
stand beside this arch and quite forget the passing 



Rambles in London. 31 

throng, and take no heed of the tumult around, as 
you think of J-ohnson and Boswell, leaning against 
this wall, after midnight, in the far-off times, and 
waking the echoes of the Temple Garden with their 
frolicsome laughter. The Bar is carefully propped 
now, and they will nurse its age as long as they 
can; but it is an obstruction to travel — as much 
so as a wall widi gates in it would be across Broad- 
way — and it must come down. (It was removed 
in the summer of 1878.) They will, probably, set it 
up, newly built, in another place. Nothing is rashly 
destroyed in England. They have even left un- 
touched a little piece of the original scaffolding 
built around St. Paul's ; and this fragment of decay- 
ing wood may still be seen, wedged between two 
pilasters, high upon the side of the cathedral. The 
Rainbow, the Mitre, the Cheshire Cheese, Dolly's 
Chop-House, and the Round Table — all taverns or 
pubhc-houses that were frequented by the old wits — 
are still extant. The Cheshire Chsese is scarcely 
changed from what it was when Johnson, Gold- 
smith, and their comrades ate beefsteak pie and 
drank porter there, and the Doctor " tossed and 
gored several persons," as it was his cheerful cus- 
tom to do. The benches in that room are as un- 
comfortable as they well could be ; mere ledges of 
well-worn wood, on which the visitor sits bolt up- 
right, in difficult dignity ; but there is, probably, 
nothing on earth that would induce the owner to 
alter them — and he is quite right. The conserva- 



32 The Trip to England. 

tive principle in the English mind, if it has saved 
some trash, has saved more treasure. At the foot of 
Buckingham street, a little off the Strand, — where 
was situated an estate of George Villiers, first Duke 
of Buckingham, who was assassinated in 1628, and 
whose tomb may be seen in Henry the Seventh's 
chapel, in Westminster Abbey, — still stands the 
slowly crumbling ruin of the old Water Gate, so 
often mentioned as the spot where accused traitors 
were embarked for the Tower. The river, in former 
times, flowed up to this, but the land along the 
margin of the Thames has been redeemed, in our 
day, and the magnificent Victoria and Albert Em- 
bankments now hem in the river for a long distance 
on both sides. The Water Gate, in fact, stands in 
a little park on the north bank of the Thames. Not 
far away is the Adelphi Terrace, where Garrick 
lived and died [obt. January 20th, 1779, aged sixty- 
three], and where, in 1822, his widow expired, at a 
great age. The house of Garrick. is let in "cham- 
bers" now. If you walk up the Strand toward 
Charing Cross, you presently come near to the 
Church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which is one 
of the best works of Sir Christopher Wren. The 
fogs have stained this building with such a deftly 
artistic touch that its appearance has all the charm 
of a lovely stereoscopic view. Nell Gwyn's name 
is connected with St. Martin's. She used to wor- 
ship there, and she left an incessant legacy to the 
ringers of the bell ; and at stated times, to this 



Rambles in London. 33 

day, they ring it for '-'poor Nelly's" sake. Her 
funeral occurred in this church, and was very pom- 
pous, and no less a person than Tennison (after- 
wards Archbishop of Canterbury) preached the 
funeral sermon. That prelate's dust reposes in 
Lambeth Church, which can be seen, across the 
river, from this part of Westminster. If you walk 
down the Strand, through Temple Bar, you presently 
reach the Temple; and there is no place in London 
where the past and the present are so strangely con- 
fronted as they are here. The venerable church, 
so quaint with its cone-pointed turrets, was sleep- 
ing in the sunshine when first I saw it; sparrows 
were twittering around its spires, and gliding in 
and out of the crevices in its ancient walls ; while 
from within a strain of organ music, low and sweet, 
trembled forth, till the air became a benediction, 
and every common thought and feeling was chas- 
tened away from mind and heart. The grave of 
Goldsmith is close to the pathway that runs beside 
this church, on a terrace raised above the founda- 
tion of the building, and above the little grave-yard 
of the Templars, that nestles at its base. As I stood 
beside the resting-place of that sweet poet, it was 
impossible not to feel both grieved and glad — 
grieved at the thought of all he suffered, and of all 
that the poetic nature must always suflfer before it 
will give forth its immortal music for mankind : 
glad that his gentle spirit found rest at last, and 
that time has given him the glory he would most 



34 The Trip to England. 

have prized — the affection of all true hearts. A 
grey stone, coflEin-shaped, and marked with across, — 
after the fashion of the contiguous tombs of the 
Templars, — is imposed upon his grave. One sur- 
face bears the inscription, " Here lies Oliver Gold- 
smith;" the other presents the dates of his birth 
and death. I tried to call up the scene of his burial, 
when, around the open grave, on that tearful April 
evening, Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Beauclerc, 
Bos well, Davies, Kelly, Palmer, and the rest of that 
broken circle, may have gathered to witness 

" The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid, 
And the last rites that dust to dust conveyed." 

No place could be less romantic than Southwark 
is now ; but there are few places in England that 
possess a greater charm for the literary pilgrim. 
Shakespeare lived there, and it was there that he 
managred his theatre and made his fortune. Old 
London Bridge spanned the Thames, at this point, 
in those days, and was the only road to the Surrey 
side of the river. The theatre stood near the end 
of the bridge, and was thus easy of access to the 
wits and beaux of London. No trace of it now re- 
mains; but a pubhc-house called the "Globe" — 
which was its name — is standing there; and the 
old church of St. Saviour's — into which Shakes- 
peare must often have entered — still braves the 
storms, and still resists the encroachments of time 
and change. In Shakespeare's day there were 



Rambles in Lo7idon. 35 

houses on each side of London Bridge ; and, as he 
walked on the bank of the Thames, he coukl look 
across to the tower, and to Baynard Castle, which 
had been the residence of Richard, Duke of Glos- 
ter, and could see, uplifted high in air, the spire of 
Old St. Paul's. The borough of Southwark was 
then but thinly peopled. Many of its houses, as 
may be seen in an old picture of the city, were sur- 
rounded by fields or gardens ; and life to its inhabit- 
ants must have been comparatively rural. Now, it 
is packed with buildings, gridironed with railways, 
crowded with people, and to the last degree reso- 
nant and feverish with action and effort. Life 
swarms, traffic bustles, and travel thunders, all 
round the cradle of the British drama. The old 
church of St. Saviour's alone preserves the sacred 
memory of the past. I made a pilgrimage to 
this shrine, in the company of one of the kindliest 
humorists in England. We took boat at West- 
minster Bridge, and landed close by the church in 
Southwark, and we were so fortunate as to get per- 
mission to enter the church without a guide. The 
oldest part of it is the Lady Chapel — a wing which, 
in English cathedrals, is placed behind the choir. 
Through this we strolled, alone and in silence. 
Every footstep there falls upon a grave. The pave- 
ment is one mass of grave-stones ; and through the 
lofty, stained windows of the chapel a solemn light 
pours in upon the sculptured names of men and 
women who have long been dust. In one corner is 



36 The Trip to England. 

an ancient stone coffin — a relic of the Roman days 
of Britain. This is the room in which Stephen 
Gardiner — Bishop of Winchester, in the days of 
cruel Queen Mary ^ held his ecclesiastical court, 
and condemned many a dissentient devotee to the 
rack and the faggot: in this very room he had him- 
self been put to trial, in his hour of misfortune. 
Both Mary and Elizabeth must often have entered 
this chapel. But it is in the choir, hard by, that 
the pilgrim pauses with most of reverence; for here, 
not far from the altar, he stands upon the graves of 
Edmund Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip 
Massinger. They rest almost side by side, and 
only their names arid the dates of their death are 
cut in the tablets that mark their sepulchres. Ed- 
mund Shakespeare, the younger brother of William, 
was an actor in his company, and died in 1607, aged 
twenty-seven. The great poet must have stood at 
this grave, and suffered and wept here ; and some- 
how the lover of Shakespeare comes very near to 
the heart of the master, when he stands in this place. 
Massinger was buried there, March 18, 1638, — 
the parish register recording him as "a stranger." 
Fletcher — of the Beaumont and Fletcher brother- 
hood — was buried there, in 1625 : Beaumont's grave 
is in the Abbey. The dust of Henslowe, the man- 
ager, also rests beneath the pavement of St. Sav- 
iour's. In the north transept of the church is the 
tomb of John Gower, the old poet — whose effigy, 
carved and painted, reclines upon it, and is not 



Rambles in London. t^'j 

pleasant to behold. A formal, uncomely, severe as- 
pect he must have had, if he resembled this image. 
The tomb has been moved from the spot where it 
first stood — a proceeding made necessary by a fire 
that destroyed part of the old church. It is said that 
Gower caused this tomb to be erected during his 
life-time, so that it might be in readiness to receive 
his bones. The bones are lost, but the memorial 
remains — sacred to the memory of the father of 
Eno^hsh sono^. This tomb was restored bv the 
Duke of Sutherland, in 1830. It is enclosed by a 
little fence made of iron spears, painted brown and 
gilded at their points. I went into the new part of 
the church, and, quite alone, knelt in one of the 
pews, and long remained there, overcome with 
thoughts of the past, and of the transient, moment- 
ary nature of this our earthly life and the shadows 
that we pursue. 

One object of merriment attracts a passing 
glance in Southwark Church. There is a tomb in 
a corner of it, that commemorates an ancient 
maker of patent medicine — an elaborate struct- 
ure, with the deceased cut in effigy, and with 
a long and sonorous epitaph on the pedestal. 
These are two of the lines : 

" His virtues and his Pills are so well known, 
That envy can't confine them under stone." 

Shakespeare once lived in Clink street, in the 
borough of Southwark. Goldsmith practised medi- 



38 The Trip to EnglaJtd. 

cine there, for a while. Chaucer came there, with 
his Canterbury Pilgrims, and stopped at the Tab- 
ard Inn. It must have been a romantic region, in 
the old times ; but it bears now the same relation 
to London that Brooklyn bears to New-York — ex- 
cept that it is more populous, active, and noisy. 




IV. 



A VISIT TO WINDSOR. 



TF the beauty of England were merely super- 
-^ ficial it would produce a merely superficial 
effect. It would cause a passing pleasure, and 
would be forgotten. It certainly would not — as 
now in fact it does — inspire a deep, joyous, serene 
and grateful contentment, and linger in the mind, 
a gracious and beneficent remembrance. The con- 
quering and lasting potency of it resides not 
alone in loveliness of expression, but in loveliness 
of character. Having first greatly blessed the 
British Islands with the natural advantages of 
position, climate, soil, and products, nature has 
wrought out their development and adornment as 
a necessary consequence of the spirit of their 
inhabitants. The picturesque variety and pastoral 



40 The Trip to England. 

repose of the English landscape spring, in a con- 
siderable measure, from the imaginative taste and 
the affectionate gentleness of the English people. 
The state of the country, Hke its social constitu- 
tion, flows from principles within (which are con- 
stantly suggested), and it steadily comforts and 
nourishes the mind with a sense of kindly feeling, 
moral rectitude, solidity, and permanence. Thus 
in the peculiar beauty of England the ideal is 
made the actual — is expressed in things more 
than in words ; and in things by which words are 
transcended. Milton's " L' Allegro," fine as it is, 
is not so fine as the scenery — the crystallized, em- 
bodied poetry — out of which it arose. All the 
delicious rural verse that has been written in Eng- 
land is only the excess and superflux of her own 
poetic opulence ; it has rippled from the hearts 
of her poets just as the fragrance floats away 
from her hawthorn hedges. At every step of his 
progress the pilgrim through English scenes is 
iinpressed with this sovereign excellence of the 
accomplished fact, as contrasted with any words 
that can be said in its celebration. 

Among representative scenes which are eloquent 
with this instructive meaning, — scenes easily and 
pleasurably accessible to the traveller, in what 
Dickens expressively called "the green, English 
summer weather," — is the region of Windsor. 
The chief features of it have often been described ; 
,the charm that it exercises can only be suggested. 



A Visit to WiJidsor. 41 

To see Windsor, moreover, is to comprehend, as 
at a glance, the old feudal system, and to feel, in 
a profound and special way, the pomp of English 
character and history. More than this : It is to 
rise to that ennobling exaltation which always 
accompanies broad, retrospective contemplation of 
the current of human affairs. In this quaint, dec- 
orous town — nestled at the base of that mighty 
and magnificent castle which has been the home 
of princes for more than five hundred years — the 
imaginative mind wanders over vast tracts of the 
past, and beholds, as in a mirror, the pageants 
of chivalry, the coronations of kings, the strifes 
of sects, the battles of armies, the schemes of 
statesmen, the decay of transient systems, the 
growth of a rational civilization, and the everlast- 
ing march of thought. Every prospect of the 
region intensifies this sentiment of contemplative 
grandeur. As you look from the castle walls 
your gaze takes in miles and miles of blooming 
country, sprinkled over with little hamlets, wherein 
the utmost stateliness of learning and rank is 
gracefully commingled with all that is lovely and 
soothing in rural life. Not far away rise the 
"antique towers" of Eton — 

" Where grateful Science still adores 
Her Henry's holy shade." 

It was in Windsor Castle that her Henry was 
born ; and there he often held his court ; and it 



42 The Trip to England. 

is in St. George's Chapel that his relics repose. In 
the dim distance stands the church of Stoke-Pogis, 
about which Gray was wont to wander, 

" Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade." 

You recognize now a deeper significance than ever 
before in the " solemn stillness " of the incom- 
parable Elegy. The luminous twihght mood of that 
immortal poem — its pensive reverie and solemn 
passion — is inherent in the scene ; and you feel 
that it was there, and there only, that the genius 
of its exceptional author — austerely gentle and 
severely pure, and thus in perfect harmony with 
its surroundings — could have been moved to that 
sublime outburst of inspiration and eloquence. 
Near at hand, in the midst of your reverie, the 
mellow organ sounds from the chapel of St. 
George, where, under "fretted vault" and over 
" long-drawn aisle," depend the ghostly, mould- 
ering banners of ancient knights — as still as the 
bones of the dead-and-gone monarchs that crumble 
in the crypt below. In this church are many of the 
old kings and nobles of England. The handsome 
and gallant Edward the Fourth here found his 
erave : and near it is that of the accomphshed Hast- 
ings —his faithful friend, to the last and after. Here 
lies the dust of the stalwart, impetuous, and savage 
Henry the Eighth, and here the ill-starred and 
hapless Queen Caroline; and here, at midnight, 
by the light of torches, they laid beneath the 



A Visit to Windsor. ' 43 

pavement the mangled body of Charles the First. 
As you stand on Windsor ramparts, pondering 
thus upon the storied past and the evanescence of 
" all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave," your 
eyes rest dreamily on green fields far below, 
through which, under tall elms, the brimming and 
sparkling river flows on without a sound, and in 
which a few figures, dwarfed by distance, flit here 
and there, in seeming aimless idleness ; while, 
warned homeward by impending sunset, the chat- 
tering birds circle and float around the lofty 
towers of the castle ; and delicate perfumes of 
seringa and jasmine are wafted up from dusky, 
unknown depths at the base of its ivied steep. 
At such an hour I stood on those ramparts, and 
saw the shy villages and rich meadow^s of fertile 
Berkshire, all red and golden with sunset light; 
and at such an hour I stood in the lonely cloisters 
of St. George's Chapel, and heard the distant 
organ sob, and saw the sunlight fade up the grey 
walls, and felt and knew the sanctity of silence. 
Age and death have made this church illustrious ; 
but the spot itself has its own innate charm of 
mystical repose. 

" No use of lanthorns ; and in one place lay 
Feathers and dust to-day and yesterday." 

The drive from the front of Windsor Castle 
is through a broad and stately avenue, three miles 
in length, straight as an arrow and level as a 



44 The Trip to England. 

standing pool ; and this white highway through 
the green and fragrant sod is sumptuously em- 
bowered, from end to end, with double rows of 
magnificent old elms. The Windsor avenue, 
like the splendid chestnut grove at Bushy Park, 
long famous among the pageants of rural Eng- 
land, has often been described. It is after leav- 
ing this that the rambler comes upon the rarer 
beauties of Windsor Park and . Forest. From 
the far end of the avenue, — where, in a superb 
position, the equestrian statue of King George 
rises on its massive pedestal of natural rock, — 
the road winds away, through shaded dell and 
verdant glade, past great gnarled beeches and 
under boughs of elm, and yew, and oak, till 
its silver thread is lost in the distant woods. 
At intervals a branching path-way strays off to 
some secluded lodge, half hidden in foliage — the 
property of the Crown, and the rustic residence of 
a scion of the royal race. In one of these retreats 
dwelt poor old George the Third, in the days of 
his mental darkness ; and the memory of the 
agonizing king seems still to cast a shadow on the 
mysterious and melancholy house. They show 
you, under glass, in one of the lodge gardens, an 
enormous grape-vine, owned by the Que,en — a 
vine which, from its single stalwart trunk, spreads 
its teeming branches, laterally, at least two hun- 
dred feet in each direction. So come use and 
thrift, hand in hand with romance ! Many an 



A Visit to Windsor. 45 

aged oak is passed, in your progress, round which, 
"at still midnight," Heme the Hunter might still 
take his ghostly prowl, shaking his chain "in a 
most hideous and dreadful manner." The wreck of 
the veritable Heme's Oak, it is said, was rooted 
out, together with other ancient and decayed 
trees, in the time of George the Third, and in 
somewhat too literal fulfilment of his Majesty's 
misinterpreted command. This great park is four- 
teen miles in circumference, and contains nearly 
four thousand acres ; and many of the youngest 
trees that adorn it are more than one hundred 
and fifty years old. Far in its heart you stroll 
by Virginia Water — an artificial lake, but fault- 
less in its quiet beauty — and perceive it so deep 
and so breezy that a full-rigged ship-of-war, with 
heavy armament, can navigate its wind-swept, 
curlinof billows. In the dim ofroves that frino:e 
its margin are many nests wherein pheasants 
are bred, to fall by the royal shot and to supply 
the royal tables : these you may contemplate, but 
not approach. At a point in your walk, seques- 
tered and lonely, they have set up and skilfully 
disposed the fragments of a genuine ruined tem- 
ple, brought from the remote East — rehc, per- 
chance, of "Tadmor's marble waste," and certainly 
a most solemn memorial of the morning twi- 
light of time. Broken arch, storm-stained pillar, 
and shattered column are here shrouded with 
moss and ivy ; and should you chance to see 



46 The Trip to England. 

them as the evening shadows deepen and the 
evening wind sighs mournfully in the grass, your 
fancy will not fail to drink in the perfect illusion 
that one of the stateliest structures of antiquity 
has slowly crumbled where now its fragments 
remain. 

Quaint is a descriptive epithet that has been 
much abused ; but it may, with absolute pro- 
priety, be applied to Windsor. The devious little 
streets there visible, and the carved and timber- 
crossed buildings, often of great age, are uncom- 
monly rich in the expressiveness of imaginative 
character. The emotions and the fancy, equally 
with the sense of necessity and the instinct of use, 
have exercised their influence and uttered their 
spirit in the shaping and adornment of the town. 
While it constantly feeds the eye — with that 
pleasing irregularity of lines and forms which is so 
delicious and refreshing — it quite as constantly 
nurtures the sense of romance which ought to play 
so large a part in all our lives, redeeming us from 
the tyranny of the commonplace and intensifying 
all the high feelings and noble aspirations that 
are possible to human nature. England contains 
many places like Windsor; some that blend, in 
even richer amplitude, the elements of quaint- 
ness, loveliness, and magnificence. The meaning 
of them all, as it seemed to me, is the same : that 
romance, beauty, and gentleness are not effete, 
but forever vital ; that their forces are within our 



A Visit to Windsor. 47 

own souls, and ready and eager to find their way 
into all our thoughts, actions, and circumstances, 
and to brighten for every one of us the face of 
every day ; that they ought neither to be relegated 
to the distant and the past, nor kept for our books 
and day-dreams alone ; but — in a calmer and 
higher mood than is usual in this age of universal 
mediocrity, critical scepticism, and miscellaneous 
tumult — should be permitted to flow out into our 
architecture, adornments, and customs, to hallow 
and preserve our antiquities, to soften our manners, 
to give us tranquillity, patience, and tolerance, to 
make our country loveable for our own hearts, and 
so to enable us to bequeath it, sure of love and 
reverence, to succeeding ages. 




V. 



THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER. 



'T^HE American who, having been a careful 
-*- and interested reader of English history, 
visits London for the first time, naturally expects 
to find the ancient city in a state of mild decay ; 
and he is, consequently, a little startled at first, 
upon realizing that the Present is quite as vital as 
ever the Past was, and that London antiquity is, 
in fact, swathed in the robes of every-day action, 
and very much alive. When, for example, you enter 
Westminster Hall — "the great hall of William 
Rufus " — you are beneath one of the most glori- 
ous canopies in the world — one which was built 
by Richard the Second, whose grave, chosen by 
himself, is in the Abbey, just across the street 



The Palace of Westminster. 49 

from where you stand. But this old hall is now 
only a vestibule to the Palace of Westminster, The 
Lords and the Commons of England, on their way 
to the Houses of Parliament, pass every day over 
the spot on which Charles the First was tried 
and condemned, and on which occurred the trial 
of Warren Hastings. It is a mere thoroughfare 
— glorious though it be, alike in structure and 
historic renown. The Palace Yard, near by, was 
the scene of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh ; 
but all that now marks the spot is a rank of cabs 
and a shelter for cab-drivers. In Bishopsgate 
street — where Shakespeare once lived — you 
may find Crosby House ; the same to which, in 
Shakespeare's tragedy, the Duke of Gloster 
requests the retirement of Lady Anne. It is a 
restaurant now ; and you may enjoy a capital 
chop and excellent beer, in the veritable throne- 
room of Richard the Third. The house of Cardi- 
nal Wolsey, in Fleet street is now a shop. Milton 
once lived in Golden Lane ; and Golden Lane was 
a sweet and quiet spot. It is a slum now, dingy 
and dismal, and the visitor is glad to get out of it. 
To-day makes use of yesterday, all the world over. 
It is not in London, certainly, that you find much 
of anything — except old churches — mouldering 
in silence, solitude, and neglect. 

Those who see every day, during the Parliam.en- 
tary session, the mace that is borne through the 
lobby of the House of Commons, although they are 

4 



5o The Trip to England. 

obliged, on every occasion, to remove their hats as 
it passes, do not, probably, view that symbol with 
much interest. Yet it is the same mace that Oliver 
Cromwell insulted, when he dissolved the Parha- 
ment, and cried out "Take away that bauble ! " I 
saw it one day, on its passage to the table of the 
Commons, and was glad to remove the hat of re- 
spect to what it signifies — the power and majesty 
of the free people of England. The Speaker of 
the House was walking behind it, very grand in 
his wig and gown, and the members trooped in 
at his heels, to secure their places by being pre- 
sent at the opening prayer. A little later I was 
provided with a seat, in a dim corner, in that 
august assemblage of British Senators, and could 
observe at ease their management of the public 
business. The Speaker was on his throne ; the 
mace was on its table ; the hats of the Commons 
were on their heads ; and over this singular, ani- 
mated, ever3'-day, and yet impressive scene, the 
waning light of a summer afternoon poured softly 
down, through the high, stained, and pictured win- 
dows of one of the most symmetrical halls in the 
world. It did not happen to be a day of excitement. 
The Irish members had not then begun to impede 
the transaction of business, for the sake of drawing 
attention to the everlasting wrongs of Ireland. Yet 
it was a lively day. Curiosity on the part of the 
Opposition, and a respectful dubiousness on the 
part of Her Majesty's representatives, were the pre- 



The Palace of Westminster. 51 

vailing conditions. I thought I had never before 
heard so many questions asked — outside of the 
French grammar — and asked to so little purpose. 
Everybody wanted to know, and nobody wanted to 
tell. Each inquirer took off his hat when he rose 
to ask, and put it on again, when he sat down to be 
answered. Each governmental sphinx bared his 
brow when he emerged to divulge, and covered it 
again when he subsided without divulging. The 
respect of all these interlocutors for each other 
steadily remained, however, of the most deferential 
and considerate description ; so that — without dis- 
courtesy — it was impossible not to think of Byron's 
" mildest mannered man that ever scuttled ship or 
cut a throat." Underneath this velvety, purring, 
conventional manner the observer could readily 
discern the fires of passion, prejudice, and strong 
antagonism. They make no parade in the House 
of Commons. They attend to their business. And 
upon every topic that is brought before their notice 
they have definite ideas, strong convictions, and 
settled purposes. The topic of Army Estimates, 
upon the occasion to which I refer, seemed espe- 
cially to arouse their ardour. Discussion of this 
was continually diversified by cries of " O ! " and 
of " Hear ! " and of " Order ! " and sometimes these 
cries smacked more of derision than of compliment. 
Many persons spoke, but no person spoke well. 
An off-hand, matter-of-fact, shambling method of 
speech would seem to be the fashion, in the British 



52 The 2'rip to England. 

House of Commons. I remembered the anecdote 
that De Ouincey tells, about Sheridan and the 
young member who quoted Greek. It was easy to 
perceive how completely out of place the sophomore 
orator would be, in that assemblage. Britons like 
better to make speeches than to hear them, and 
they never will be slaves to oratory. The moment 
a certain windy gentleman got the floor, and began 
to read a manuscript respecting the Indian Govern- 
ment, as many as forty Commons arose and noisily 
walked out of the House. Your pilgrim likewise 
hailed the moment of his deliverance, and was glad 
to escape to the open air. 

Books have been written to describe the Palace 
of Westminster ; but it is observable that this 
structure, however much its magnificence deserves 
commemorative applause, is deficient, as yet, in the 
charm which resides in association. The old Pal- 
ace of St. James, with its low, dusky walls, its 
round towers, and its fretted battlements, is more 
impressive, because history has freighted it with 
meaning, and time has made it beautiful. But the 
Palace of Westminster is a splendid structure. It 
covers eight acres of ground, on the bank of the 
Thames ; it contains eleven quadrangles and five 
hundred rooms ; and, when its niches for statuary 
have all been filled, it will contain two hundred and 
twenty-six statues. The monuments in St. Ste- 
phen's Hall — into which you pass from Westminster 
Hall, which has been incorporated into the Palace, 



The Palace of Westtnlnster. 53 

and is its only ancient, and therefore its most inter- 
esting feature — indicate, very eloquently, what a 
superb art-gallery this will one day become. The 
statues are the images of Selden, Hampden, Falk- 
land, Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham, Mans- 
field, Burke, Fox, Pitt, and Grattan. Those of 
Mansfield and Grattan present, perhaps, the most 
of character and power, making you feel that they 
are indubitably accurate portraits, and drawing you 
by the charm of personality. There are statues, 
also, in Westminster Hall, commemorative of the 
Georges, William and Mar}^, and Anne ; but it is 
not of these you think, nor of any local and every- 
day object, when you stand beneath the wonderful 
roof of Richard the Second. Nearly eight hundred 
years " their cloudy wings expand " above this fab- 
ric, and copiously shed upon it the fragrance of old 
renown. Richard the Second was deposed there : 
Cromwell was there installed Lord Protector of Eng- 
land: John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and Straf- 
ford were there condemned : and it was there that 
the possible, if not usual, devotion of woman s heart 
was so touchingly displayed, by her 

"Whose faith drew strength from death, 
And prayed her Russell up to God." 

No one can realize, without personal experience, 
the number and variety of pleasures accessible to 
the resident of London. These may not be piquant 
to him who has them always within his reach. I 



54 The Trip to England. 

met with several residents of the British Capital who 
had always intended to visit the Tower, but had never 
done so. But to the stranger they possess a con- 
stant and keen fascination. The Derby this year 
[1877], was thought to be, comparatively, a tame 
race ; but I know of one spectator who saw it from 
the top of the Grand Stand and thought that the 
scene it presented was wonderfully brilliant. The 
sky had been overcast with dull clouds till the mo- 
ment when the race was won ; but, just as Archer, 
rising in his saddle, lifted his horse forward and 
gained the goal alone, the sun burst forth, and shed 
upon the Downs a sheen of gold, and lit up all the 
distant hills, and all the far-stretching roads that 
wind away from the region of Epsom like threads 
of silver through the green. Carrier-pigeons were 
instantly launched off to London, with the news of 
the victory of Silvio. There was one winner on 
the Grand Stand who had laid bets on Silvio, for 
no other reason than because this horse bore the 
prettiest name in the hst. The Derby, like Christ- 
mas, comes but once a year ; but other allurements 
are almost perennial. Greenwich, for instance, 
with its delicious white-bait dinner, invites the epi- 
cure during the best part of the London season. 
The favourite tavern is the Trafalgar — in which 
each room is named after some magnate of the 
old British Navy ; and Nelson, Hardy, and Rodney 
are household words. Another cheery place of re- 
sort is The Ship. The Hospitals are at Greenwich, 



The Palace of Westmhister. 55 

that Dr. Johnson thought to be too fine for a char- 
ity ; and back of these — which are ordinary enough 
now, in comparison with modern structures erected 
for a kindred purpose — stands the famous Obser- 
vatory which keeps time for Europe. This place 
is hallowed, also, by the grave of Wolfe — to whom, 
however there is a monument in Westminster Ab- 
bey. Greenwich sets one thinking of Queen Eliza- 
beth, who was born there, who often held her court 
there, and who often sailed thence, in her barge, up 
the river, to Richmond — her favourite retreat, and 
the scene of her last days and her wretched death. 
Few spots can compare with Richmond, in brill- 
iancy of landscape. This place — the Shene of old 
times — was long a royal residence. The woods 
and meadows that you see from the terrace of the 
Star and Garter Tavern — spread out on a rolling 
plain as far as the eye can reach — sparkle like 
emeralds ; and the Thames, dotted with little toy- 
like boats, propelled by the oars of coquettishly 
apparelled rowers, shines with all the deep lustre of 
the black eyes of Spain. Pope's lovely home is 
here, in the village of Twickenham ; and not far 
away glimmers forth to view the " pale shrine " of 
the poet Thomson — whose dust is in Richmond 
Church. As I drove through the vast and sweetly 
sylvan Park of Richmond, in the late afternoon of a 
breezy summer day, and heard the whispering of 
the great elms, and saw the gentle, trustful deer 
couched at ease, in the golden glades, I heard all the 



56 The Trip to Engla?id. 

while, in the quiet chambers of thought, the tender 
lament of Collins — which is now a prophecy ful- 
filled : 

" Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, 

When Thames in summer wreaths is drest; 
And oft suspend the dashing oar, 
To bid his gentle spirit rest." 




VI. 



WARWICK AND KENILWORTH. 



TV LL the way from London to Warwick it rained ; 
-^ ^ not heavily but with a gentle fall. The grey 
clouds hung low over the landscape, and softly 
darkened it ; so that meadows of scarlet and 
emerald, the shining foliage of elms, grey turret, 
nestled cottage, and hmpid river were as mysteri- 
ous and evanescent as pictures seen in dreams. 
At Warwick the rain had fallen and ceased, and 
the walk from the station to the inn was on a 
road — or on a foot-path by the road-side — still 
hard and damp with the water it had absorbed. 
A fresh wind blew from the fields, sweet with the 
rain and fragrant with the odour of leaves and 
flowers. The streets of the ancient town — entered 



58 The Trip to England. 

through an old Norman arch — were deserted and 
silent. It was Sunday when I first came to the 
country of Shakespeare ; and over all the region 
there brooded a sacred stillness pecuhar to the 
time and harmonious beyond utterance with the 
sanctity of the place. As I strive, after many 
days, to call back and to fix in words the impres- 
sions of that subhme experience, the same awe 
falls upon me now which fell upon me then. 
Nothing else upon earth — no natural scene, no 
relic of the past, no pageantry of the present — 
can vie with the shrine of Shakespeare, in power 
to impress, to humble, and to exalt the devout 
spirit that has been nurtured at the fountain of his 
transcendent genius. 

A fortunate way to approach Stratford-on-Avon 
is by Warwick and Kenilworth. These places are 
not on a direct line of travel ; but the scenes and 
associations which they successively present are 
such as assume a symmetrical order, increase in 
interest, and grow to a delightful culmination. Ob- 
jects which Shakespeare himself must have seen 
are still visible there ; and, little by little, in con- 
tact with these, the pilgrim through this haunted 
region is mentally saturated with that atmosphere 
of serenity and romance in which the youth of 
Shakespeare was passed, and by which his works 
and his memory are embalmed. No one should 
come abruptly upon the Poet's Home. The mind 
needs to be prepared for the impression that 



Warwick and Kenihuort/i. 59 

awaits it ; and in this gradual approach it finds 
preparation, both suitable and dehcious. The 
luxuriance of the country — its fertile fields, its 
brilliant fohage, its myriads of wild flowers, its 
pomp of colour and of physical vigour and bloom, 
do not fail to announce, to every mind — howso- 
ever heedless — that this is a fit place for the birth 
and nurture of a great man. But this is not all. 
As you stroll in the quaint streets of Warwick, as 
you drive to Kenilworth, as you muse in that 
poetic ruin, as you pause in the old grave-yard in 
the valley below, as you pass beneath the crum- 
bling arch of the ancient Priory, at every step of 
the way you are haunted by a vague sense of 
some impending grandeur ; you are aware of a 
presence that fills and sanctifies the scene. The 
emotion that is thus inspired is very glorious ; 
never to be elsewhere felt ; and never to be for- 
gotten. 

The cyclopaedias and the guide-books dilate, 
with much particularity and characteristic elo- 
quence, upon Warwick Castle and other great 
features of Warwickshire ; and an off-hand sketch 
cannot aspire, and should not attempt, to emulate 
those authentic chronicles. The attribute which 
all such records omit is the atmosphere ; and this, 
perhaps, is rather to be indicated than described. 
The prevailing quality of it is a certain high and 
sweet solemnity — a feeling kindred with the pla- 
cid, happy melancholy that steals over the mind, 



6o The Trip to Engl mid. 

when, on a sombre afternoon in autumn, you 
stand in the church-yard, and Hsten, amidst rus- 
thng branches and sighing grass, to the low mu- 
sic of distant organ and chaunting choir. Peace, 
haunted by romance, dwells here in reverie. The 
great tower of Warwick, based in silver Avon and 
pictured in its slumbering waters, seems musing 
upon the centuries over which it has watched, and 
full of unspeakable knowledge and thought. The 
dark and massive gate-ways of the town and the 
timber-crossed fronts of its antique houses live on 
in the same strange dream and perfect repose ;• and 
all along the drive to Kenilworth are equal images 
of rest — of a rest in which there is nothing supine 
or sluggish, no element of death or decay, but in 
which passion, imagination, beauty, and sorrow, 
seized at their topmost poise, seem crystalhzed in 
eternal calm. What opulence of splendid hfe is 
vital forever in Kenilworth's crumbling ruin, there 
are no words to say. What pomp of royal banners ! 
what dignity of radiant cavaliers ! what loveliness 
of stately and exquisite ladies ! what magnificence 
of banquets ! what wealth of pageantry ! what 
lustre of illumination ! The same perfect music 
that the old poet Gascoigne heard there, three 
hundred years ago, is still sounding on, to-day. 
The proud and cruel Leicester still walks in his 
vaulted hall. The imperious face of the Virgin 
Queen still from her dais looks down on plumed 
courtiers and jeweled dames ; and still the moon- 



Warwick and Kenihvorth. 6i 

light, streaming through the turret-window, falls 
on the white bosom and the great, startled, black 
eyes of Amy Robsart, waiting for her lover. The 
gaze of the pilgrim, indeed, rests only upon old, 
grey, broken walls, overgrown with green moss 
and ivy, and pierced by irregular casements 
through which the sun shines, and the winds blow, 
and the rains drive, and the birds fly, amidst utter 
desolation. But silence and ruin are here alike 
eloquent and awful ; and, much as the place 
impresses you by what remains, it impresses you 
far more by what has vanished. Ambition, love, 
pleasure, power, misery, tragedy — these are gone ; 
and being gone they are immortal. I plucked, in 
the garden of Kenihvorth, one of the most brilliant 
red roses that ever grew ; and, as I pressed it to 
my hps, I seemed to touch the lips of that superb, 
bewildering beauty who outweighed England's 
crown, and whose spirit is the everlasting genius 
of the place. 

There is a crescent of thatch-roofed cottages 
close by the ruins of the old castle, in which con- 
tentment seems to have made her home. The ivy 
embowers them. The roses cluster around their 
little windows. The greensward slopes away, in 
front, from the big, flat stones that are embedded 
in the grassy sod before their doors. Down in the 
valley, hard by, your steps stray through an an- 
cient grave-yard — in which modern hands have 
built a tiny church, with tower, and clock, and bell 



62 The Trip to England. 

— and past the remains of a Priory, long since 
destroyed. At many another point, on the roads 
betwixt Warwick and Kenilworth and Stratford, I 
came upon such nests of cosey, rustic quiet and 
seeming happiness. . They build their country 
houses low, in England, so that the trees over- 
hang them, and the cool, friendly, flower-gemmed 
earth — parent, and stay, and bourne of mortal 
life ! — is tenderly taken into their companionship. 
Here, at Kenilworth, as elsewhere, at such places 
as Richmond, Maidenhead, Cookham, and the 
region round about Windsor, I saw many a sweet 
nook where tired life might well be content to lay 
down its burden and enter into its rest. In all 
true love of country — a passion which seems to be 
more deeply felt in England than anywhere else 
upon the globe — there is love for the literal soil 
itself : and that sentiment in the human heart is 
equally natural and pious which inspires and 
perpetuates man's desire that where he found his 
cradle he may also find his grave. 

Under a cloudy sky, and through a landscape 
still wet and shining with recent rains, the drive 
to Stratford was a pleasure so exquisite that at last 
it became a pain. Just as the carriage reached 
the junction of the Warwick and Snitterfield roads, 
a ray of sunshine, streaming through a rift in the 
clouds, fell upon the neighbouring hill-side, scarlet 
with poppies, and lit the scene as with the glory 
of a celestial benediction. This sunburst, neither 



Warwick and Kenilwoi'th . 63 

growing larger nor coming nearer, followed all the 
way to Stratford ; and there, on a sudden, the 
clouds were lifted and dispersed, and "fair day- 
light" flooded the whole green country-side. The 
afternoon sun was still high in heaven when I 
alighted at the Red Horse Inn, and entered the 
little parlour of Washington Irving. They keep 
the room very much as it was when he left it ; for 
they are proud of his gentle genius and grateful for 
his commemorative words. In a corner stands the 
small, old-fashioned hair-cloth arm-chair, in which 
he sat, on that night of memory and of musing 
which he has described in the " Sketch Book." A 
brass plate is affixed to it, bearing his name ; and 
the visitor observes, in token of its age and service, 
that the hair-cloth of its seat is considerably worn 
and frayed. Every American pilgrim to Stratford 
sits in this chair ; and looks with tender interest 
on the old fire-place ; and reads the memorials of 
Irving that are hung upon the walls : and it is no 
small comfort there to reflect that our own illustri- 
ous countryman — whose name will be remembered 
with honour, as long as true literature is prized 
among men — was the first, in modern days, to 
discover the beauties and to interpret the poetry 
of the birth-place of Shakespeare. 



VII. 



STRATFORD-ON-AVON. 



/^NCE again, as it did on that delicious summer 
^-^ afternoon which is forever memorable in my 
hfe, the golden glory of the westering sun burns 
on the grey spire of Stratford Church, and on the 
ancient grave-yard below, — wherein the mossy 
stones lean this way and that, in sweet and 
orderly confusion, — and on the peaceful avenue 
of limes, and on the burnished water of silver 
Avon. The tall, arched, many-coloured windows 
of the church glint in the evenins: light. A 
cool and fragrant wind is stirring the branches 
and the grass. The small birds, calling to their 
mates, or sporting in the wanton pleasure of their 
airy life, are circhng over the church roof, or 



Stratfordoii-Avon, 65 

hidine in little crevices of its walls. On the 
vacant meadows across the river stretch away the 
long and level shadows of the pompous elms. 
Here and there, upon the river's brink, are pairs of 
what seem lovers, strolling by the reedy marge, 
or sitting upon the low tombs, in the Sabbath 
quiet. As the sun sinks and the dusk deepens, 
two figures of infirm old women, clad in black, 
pass with slow and feeble steps through the 
avenue of limes, and vanish around an angle of 
the church — which now stands all in shadow : 
and no sound is heard but the faint rustling of the 
leaves. 

Once again, as on that sacred night, the streets 
of Stratford are deserted and silent under the 
star-lit sky, and I am standing, in the dim dark- 
ness, at the door of the cottage in which Shakes- 
peare was born. It is empty, dark, and still ; 
and in all the neighbourhood there is no stir nor 
sign of life; but the quaint casements and gables 
of this haunted house, its antique porch, and the 
great timbers that cross its front are luminous 
as with a lisfht of their own, so that I see them 
with perfect distinctness. I stand there a long 
time, and I know that I am to remember these 
sights forever, as I see them now. After a 
while, with lingering reluctance, I turn away 
from this marvellous spot, and, presently passing 
through a litde, winding lane, I walk in the High 
street of the town, and mark, at the end of 

5 



66 The Trip to England. 

the prospect, the illuminated clock in the tower 
of the chapel of the Holy Cross. A few chance- 
directed steps' bring me to what was New Place 
once, where Shakespeare died ; and there again I 
pause, and long remain in meditation, gazing 
into the inclosed garden, where, under frames of 
glass, are certain strange fragments of lime and 
stone. These — which I do not then know — are 
the remains of the foundation of Shakespeare's 
house. The night wanes ; and still I walk in 
Stratford streets ; and by and by I am standing 
on the bridge that spans the Avon, and looking 
down at the thick-clustering stars reflected in its 
black and silent stream. At last, under the roof 
of the Red Horse, I sink into a troubled slumber, 
from which very soon a strain of celestial music — 
strong, sweet, jubilant, and splendid — awakens 
me in an instant, and I start up in my bed — to 
find that all around me is still as death ; and then, 
drowsily, far-off, the bell strikes three, in its weird 
and lonesome tower. 

Every pilgrim to Stratford knows beforehand, 
in a general way, what he will there behold. 
Copious and frequent description of its Shakes- 
pearean associations have made the place 
familiar to all the world. Yet these Shakes- 
pearean associations keep a perennial freshness, 
and are equally a surprise to the sight and a 
wonder to the soul. Though three centuries old, 
they are not yet stricken with age or decay. The 



Sir atford-on- Avon. 67 

house in Henley street, in which, according to 
accepted tradition, Shakespeare was born, has 
been from time to time repaired ; and so it has 
been kept sound, without having been materially 
changed from what it was in Shakespeare's youth. 
The kind old ladies who now take care of it, 
and, with so much pride and courtesy, show it to 
the visitor, called my attention to a bit of the 
ceihng of the upper chamber — the alleged room 
of Shakespeare's birth — which had begun to sag, 
and had been skilfully mended, with little laths. 
It is in this room that the numerous autographs 
are scrawled all over the ceilinof and walls. One 

o 

side of the chimney-piece here is called " The 
Actor's Pillar," so thickly is it covered with the 
names of actors ; Edmund Kean's sio^nature beins: 
among them, and still clearly legible. On one of 
the window-panes, cut with a diamond, is the 
name of " W. Scott " ; and all the panes are 
scratched with signatures — making you think of 
Douglas Jerrold's remark on bad Shakespearean 
commentators, that they resemble persons who 
write on glass with diamonds, and obscure the 
light with a multitude of scratches. The floor of 
this room, uncarpeted, and almost snow-white 
with much washing, seems still as hard as iron ; 
yet its boards have been hollowed by wear, and 
the heads of the old nails, that fasten it down, 
gleam like polished silver. You can sit in an 
antique chair, in a corner of this room, if you 



68 The Trip to E?igland. 

like, and think unutterable things. There is, 
certainly, no word that can even remotely suggest 
the feeling with which you are there overwhelmed. 
You can sit, also, in the room below, in the very 
seat, in the corner of the wide fire-place, that 
Shakespeare himself must often have occupied. 
They keep but a few sticks of furniture in any 
part of the cottage. One room is devoted to 
Shakespearean curiosities — or relics — more or 
less authentic ; one of which is a school-boy's 
form or desk, that was obtained from the old 
grammar school in High street, now modern in its 
appointments, in which Shakespeare was once 
a pupil. At the back of the cottage, now iso- 
lated from all contiguous structures, is a pleasant 
garden, and at one side is a cosey, luxurious 
little cabin — the home of order and of pious 
decorum — for the ladies who are custodians of 
the Shakespeare House. If you are a favoured 
visitor, you may receive from this garden, at 
parting, all the flowers, prettily affixed to a sheet 
of purple-edged paper, that poor Ophelia names, 
in the scene of her madness. ."There's rosemary, 
that's for remembrance : and there is pansies, 
that's for thoughts : there's fennel for you, and 
columbines : there's rue for you : there's a daisy : 
— I would give you some violets, but they withered 
all when my father died.'-' 

The minute knowledge that Shakespeare had of 
plants and flowers, and the loving appreciation 



Stratford-on-Avon. 69 

with which he describes pastoral scenery, are 
explained to the rambler in Stratford, by all that 
he sees and hears. There is a walk across the 
fields to Shottery — which the poet must often 
have taken, in the days of his courtship of Anne 
Hathaway — whereon the feet of the traveller are 
buried in wild flowers and furrow weeds. The 
high road to the hamlet, also, passes through 
rich meadows, and lands teeming with grain, 
flecked everywhere with those brilliant scarlet 
poppies which are so radiant and so bewitching in 
the English landscape. To have grown up amidst 
such surroundings, and, above all, to have experi- 
enced amidst them the passion of love, must have 
been, with Shakespeare, the intuitive acquire- 
ment of most ample and most specific knowledge 
of their manifold beauties. It would be hard to 
find a sweeter rustic retreat than Anne Hathaway's 
cottage is, even now. The tall trees embower it ; 
and over its porches, and all along its picturesque, 
irregular front, and on its thatch-roof, the wood- 
bine and the ivy climb, and there are wild roses 
and the maiden's blush. For the young poet's 
wooing no place could be fitter than this! He 
would always remember it with tender joy. They 
show you, in that cottage, an old settle, by the 
fireside, whereon the lovers may have sat together ; 
and in the rude little chamber next the roof, an 
antique, carved bedstead, which Anne Hathaway 
once owned. This, it is thought, continued to be 



yo The Trip to England. 

Anne's home, for many years of her married life — 
her husband being absent in London, and some- 
times coming down to visit her, at Shottery. " He 
was wont," says Aubrey, " to go to his native 
country once a year." The last surviving descend- 
ant of the Hathaway family — Mrs. Taylor — lives 
in the house now, and welcomes with homely hos- 
pitality the wanderers, from all lands, who seek 
— in a sympathy and reverence most honourable 
to human nature ! — the shrine of Shakespeare's 
love. There is one such wanderer who will never 
forget the parting pressure of this good woman's 
hand, and who has never parted with her farewell 
gift of woodbine and roses from the porch of Anne 
Hathaway's cottage. 

In England it is living, more than writing about 
it, that is esteemed by the best persons. They 
prize good writing, of course ; but they prize noble 
living far more. This is an ingrained principle 
and not an artificial habit, and this principle, 
doubtless, was as potent in Shakespeare's age as 
it is to-day. Nothing could be more natural than 
that this great writer should think less of his works 
than of the establishment of his home. He would 
desire, having won his fortune, to dwell in his 
native place, to enjoy the companionship and 
esteem of his neighbours, to participate in their 
pleasures, to help them in their troubles, to aid 
in the improvement and embellishment of the 
town, to deepen his hold upon the affections of all 



Straff o?'d-o?i- Avon. 71 

around him, and to feel that, at last, honoured 
and lamented, his ashes would be laid in the vil- 
lage church where he had worshipped — 

"Among familiar names to rest, 
And in the places of his youth." 

It was in 1597, about ten years after he went 
to London, that the poet began to buy property in 
Stratford, and it was about eight years after his 
first purchase that he finally settled there, at New 
Place. This mansion, as all readers know, was 
altered by Sir Hugh Clopton, who owned it about 
the middle of the eighteenth century, and was de- 
stroyed by the Rev. Mr. Gastrell, in 1757. There 
is a modern edifice on the estate now ; but 
the grounds, which have been reclaimed, — chiefly 
through the zeal of Mr. Halliwell, — are laid out 
according to the model they are supposed to 
have presented when Shakespeare owned them. 
His lawn, his orchard, and his garden are indi- 
cated ; and the grandson of his mulberry is 
growing on the very spot where that famous tree 
once flourished. You can see a part of the founda- 
tions of the old house. It seems to have had 
gables, and, no doubt, it was made of stone, and 
fashioned with the beautiful curves and broken 
lines of the Tudor architecture. They show, upon 
the lawn, a stone, of considerable size, which 
surmounted its door. The site — still the most 
commodious in Stratford — is on the corner of 



72 The IVip to England. 

High street and Chapel street; and on the oppo- 
site corner stands now, as it has stood for eight 
hundred years, the chapel of the Holy Cross, with 
square, dark tower, and fretted battlement, and 
arched casements, and Norman porch — one of 
the most romantic and picturesque churches in 
England. It was easy, when standing on that 
storied spot, to fancy Shakespeare, in the gloam- 
ing of a summer day, strolling on the lawn, 
beneath his elms, and listening to the soft and 
solemn music of the chapel organ ; or to think of 
him as stepping forth from his study, in the late 
and lonesome hours of the night, and pausing to 
" count the clock," or note " the exhalations whiz- 
zing in the air." 

The funeral train of Shakespeare, on that dark 
day when it moved from New Place to Stratford 
Church, had but a little way to go. The river, 
surely, must have seemed to hush its murmurs, 
the trees to droop their branches, the sunshine to 
grow dim — as that sad procession passed! His 
grave is under the grey pavement of the chancel, 
within the rail, and his wife and two daughters 
are buried beside him. The pilgrim who reads, 
upon the grave-stone itself, those rugged lines of 
grievous entreaty and awful imprecation which 
guard the poet's rest, feels no doubt that he is 
listening to his living voice — for he has now seen 
the enchanting beauty of the place, and he has 
now felt what passionate affection it can inspire. 



Sira(ford-on-Avon. 73 

Feeling and not manner would naturally have 
commanded that sudden agonized supplication 
and threat. Nor does such a pilgrim doubt, when 
gazing on the painted bust, above the grave, — 
made by Gerard Johnson, stone-cutter, — that he 
beholds the authentic face of Shakespeare. It 
is not the heavy face of the portraits that repre- 
sent it. There is a rapt, transfigured quality in it, 
which these do not convey. It is thoughtful, 
austere, and yet benign. Shakespeare was a hazel- 
eyed man, with auburn hair, and the colours that 
he wore were scarlet and black. Being painted, 
and also being set up at a considerable height on 
the church wall, the bust does not disclose what is 
sufficiently perceptible in a cast from it — that it 
is, in fact, the copy of a mask from the dead 
face. One of the cheeks is a little swollen, and 
the tongue is very shghtly protruded, and is 
caught between the lips. It need not be said 
that the old theory — that the poet was not a gen- 
tleman of great consideration in his own time and 
place — falls utterly and forever from the mind, 
when you stand at his grave. No man could 
have a more honourable or sacred spot of 
sepulture ; and while it illustrates the profound 
esteem of the community in which he lived, it 
testifies to the high religious character by which 
that esteem was confirmed. " I commend my 
soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping, and 
assuredly beheving, through the only merits of 



74 The 7 rip to England. 

Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker 
of life everlasting," So said Shakespeare, in his 
last Will, bowing in humble reverence the might- 
iest mind — as vast and limitless in the power to 
comprehend as to express ! — that ever wore the 
garments of mortahty. 

Once again there is a sound of organ music, 
very low and soft, in Stratford Church, and the 
dim light, broken by the richly stained windows, 
streams across the dusky chancel, filling the still 
air with opal haze, and flooding those grey grave- 
stones with its mellow radiance. Not a word is 
spoken; but, at intervals, the rustle of the leaves 
is audible, in a sighing wind. What visions are 
these, that suddenly fill the region ! What royal 
faces of monarchs, proud with power, or pallid with 
anguish ! What sweet, imperial women, gleeful 
with happy youth and love, or wide-eyed and 
rigid in tearless woe ! What warriors, with ser- 
pent diadems, defiant of death and hell ! The 
mournful eyes of Hamlet; the wild countenance 
of Lear; Ariel with his harp, and Prospero with 
his wand ! Here is no death ! All these, and 
more, are immortal shapes ; and he that made 
them so, though his mortal part be but a handful 
of dust in yonder crypt, is a glorious angel beyond 
the stars ! 



VIIL 



A GLIMPSE OF FRANCE. 



"pARIS, August 1st, 1877. — It was a beautiful 
•^ afternoon in July when first I saw the shores 
of France. The British Channel — a most dis- 
tressful water when rough — had been in unusual 
pleasure, like King Duncan in the play, so that 
"observation with extended view," could look 
with interest, and without nausea, on the Norman 
coast, as it rose into sight across the surges. 
This coast seemed like the Palisade bank of the 
Hudson River, and prompted thoughts of home. 
It is high and precipitous, and on one of its windy 
hills a httle chapel is perched, in picturesque 
loneliness, to the east of the stone harbour into 
which the arriving steamer glides. At Dieppe, 



76 The Trip to England, 

as at most of the Channel ports, a long pier 
projects into the sea, and this was thronged 
with spectators, as our boat steamed up to her 
moorings. The ride from Dieppe to Paris is 
charming. The road passes through Rouen and 
up the Valley of the Seine. The sky that day 
was as blue and sunny as ever it is in brilliant 
America; the air was soft and cool; and the fields 
of Normandy were lovely with rich colour, and gen- 
erous with abundance of golden crops. Now and 
then we passed little hamlets, made up of thatched 
cottages clustered around a tiny church, with its 
sad, quaint place of graves. Sheaves of wheat 
were stacked, in careless piles, in the meadows. 
Rows of the tall, lithe Lombardy poplar — so like 
the willowy girls of France — flashed by, and rows 
of the tremulous silver-leaved maple. Sometimes 
I saw rich bits of garden ground, gorgeous with 
geraniums and with many of the wild flowers 
(neglected, for the most part, in other countries), 
which the French know so well how to cultivate 
and train. In some fields the reapers were at 
work; in others women were guiding the plough; 
in others the sleek cattle and shaggy sheep were 
couched in repose, or busy with the herbage ; 
and through this smiling land the Seine flowed 
peacefully down, shining like burnished silver. 
At Rouen I caught a glimpse of the round tower 
and two spires of the famous cathedral which is 
there — esteemed one of the best pieces of Gothic 



A Glimpse of Frafice. 77 

architecture in Europe ; and I thought of Cor- 
neille, who was there born, and of Jean Dare, 
who w^as there burned. Just beyond Rouen, on 
the eastern bank of the Seine, the hills take, and 
for many miles preserve, the shape of natural 
fortifications. Zigzag pathways wind up the faces 
of these crags. A chapel crowns one of the 
loftiest summits. Cottages nestle in the vales 
below. A few gaunt wind-mills stretch forth their 
arms, upon the distant hills. Every rood of the 
land is cultivated; and here, as in England, the 
scarlet poppies brighten the green, while cosey 
hedge-rows make the landscape comfortable to the 
fancy, as well as pretty to the eye, with a sense of 
human companionship. 

In the gloaming we glided into Paris, and 
before I had been there two hours I was driving 
in the Champs Elysees and thinking of the 
Arabian Nights. Nobody can know, without 
seeing them, how glorious and imperial the great 
features of Paris are. My first morning there was 
a Sunday, and it was made beautiful beyond 
expression by sunshine, the singing of birds, the 
strains of music from passing bands, and the 
many sights and sounds which in every direction 
bespoke the cheerfulness of the people. I went 
that day to a fete in the Bois de Vincennes, where 
from noon till midnight a great throng took its 
pleasure, in the most orderly, simple, and child-like 
manner, and where I saw a "picture in little" 



78 The Trip to England. 

of the manners of the French. It was a peculiar 
pleasure, while in Paris, to rise at a very early 
hour and stroll through the markets of St. 
Honore, in which flowers have at least an equal 
place with more substantial necessities of life, and 
where order and neatness are made perfect. It 
was impressive, also, to walk in the gardens of 
the Tuileries, in those lonely morning hours, 
and to muse and moralize over the downfall of the 
dynasty of Napoleon. These gardens, formerly 
the private grounds of the Emperor, are now 
opened to the pubhc ; and streams of labourers, 
clothed in their blue blouses, pour through 
them every day. They are rapidly rebuilding 
that part of the Tuileries which was destroyed by 
the Commune ; and, in fact, though only six years 
have passed since [1871] the last revolution devas- 
tated this capital, but little trace remains of the 
ravages of that wild time. The Arc de Triomphe 
stands, in solemn majesty; the Column Vendome 
towers toward the sky ; the golden figure seems 
still in act to fly, upon the top of the Column of 
the Bastile. I saw, in the church of Notre Dame, 
the garments — stained with blood and riddled 
with bullets — that were worn by the Archbishop 
of Paris, when he was murdered by the friends of 
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity ; and I saw, 
with enthusiastic admiration, and not without a 
strong impulse to tears, the great Panorama of 
the Siege of Paris, by F. Phillipoteaux, which was 



A Glimpse of France. 79 

exhibited in the region of the Champs Elysees, 
and which is a marvel of faithful detail, true 
colour, spirited composition, and the action and 
suffering of war. But these were all the tokens 
that I chanced to see of the recent evil days of 
France. 

The more interesting sights of Paris are as- 
sociated with its older history and with the taste 
and luxury of its present period. Every person 
who visits it repairs presently to Les Invalides, to 
see the tomb of Napoleon Buonaparte. This is a 
structure that would inspire awe, even if it were 
not associated with that glittering name and 
that terrible memory. The gloom of the crypt 
in which it is sunk ; the sepulchral character 
of the mysterious, emblematic figures which 
surround it — " staring right on, with calm, eter- 
nal eyes ; " the grandeur of the dome which 
rises above it ; and its own vast size and 
deathly shape — all these characteristics unite to 
make it a most impressive object, apart from the 
thrilling fact that in this great, red-sandstone 
coffin rest, at last, after the stormiest of all human 
lives, the ashes of the most vital man of action 
who has lived in modern times. I was deeply 
impressed, too, by the sight of the tombs of 
Voltaire and Rousseau, in the vaults beneath 
the Pantheon. No device more apposite or more 
startling could have been adopted than that which 
assails you on the front of Rousseau's tomb. 



8o The Trip to England. 

The door stands ajar, and out of it issues an 
arm and hand, in marble, grasping a torch. 
It was ahnost as if the dead had spoken with 
a hving voice, to see that fateful symbol of a 
power of thought and passion which never can 
die — while human hearts remain human. There 
is a fine statue of Voltaire in the vault that holds 
his tomb. These mausoleums are merely com- 
memorative. The body of Voltaire, at any rate, 
was at once destroyed with quicklime, when laid 
in the grave, at the Abbey of Celleries, so that it 
might not be cast out of consecrated ground. 
Other tombs of departed greatness I found in 
Pere la Chaise, Moliere and La Fontaine rest 
side by side. Racine is a neighbour to them. 
Talma, Auber, Rossini, De Musset, Desclee, and 
many other illustrious names, may here be read, in 
the letters of death. I came upon Rachel's tomb, 
in the Hebrew quarter of the cemetery. It is a tall, 
narrow, stone structure, with a grated door, over 
which the name of Rachel — and nothing else — is 
graven, in black letters. Looking in through the 
grating I saw a shelf on which were vases and 
flowers, and beneath it were fourteen immortelle 
wreaths. A few cards, left by mourners of the 
dead, or by pilgrims to this solemn shrine of 
genius and illustrious renown, were upon the 
floor. I ventured to add my own, humbly and 
reverently, to the names which thus gave homage 
to the memory of a great actress, and I gathered 



A Glimpse of France. 8i 

a few leaves from the shrubbery that grows in 
front of her grave. It is a pity that this famous 
cemetery should be, as it is, comparatively desti- 
tute of flowers and grass. It contains a few 
avenues of trees ; but, for the most part, it is a 
mass of ponderous tombs, crowded close together 
upon a hot hill-side, traversed by little stony 
pathways sweltering in sun and dust. No sad- 
der grave-yard was ever seen. All the acute 
anguish of remediless suffering, all the abject 
misery and arid desolation of hopeless grief, is 
symbolized in this melancholy place. Workmen 
were repairing the tomb of Heloise and Abelard, 
and this, for a while, converted a bit of old 
romance to modern commonness. Still, I saw 
this tomb, and it was elevating to think that there 

may be 

" Words which are things, 
Hopes which do not deceive." 

The most gorgeous modern building in Paris 
is, undoubtedly, the Opera House. They are 
opening a street in front of this noble edifice, 
so as to place it at the end of yet another vista — 
as the usage is, in this magnificent city. There is 
no building in America that can vie with it in or- 
nate splendour. We do but scant justice to the solid 
qualities in the French character. Grant that the 
character is mercurial ; yet it contains elements of 
stupendous intensity and power ; and this you feel, 
as perhaps you may never have felt it before, 

6 



82 The Trip to England. 

when you look at such works as the Opera House, 
the Pantheon, the Madeleine, the InvaHdes, the 
Louvre, the Luxembourg, and the stone embank- 
ments which, for miles, hem in the Seine on both 
its sides. The grandest old building in Paris — 
also a living witness to French power and purpose 
— is the church of Notre Dame. It will not dis- 
place, in the affectionate reverence of Americans, 
the glory of Westminster Abbey ; but it will fill 
an equal place in their memory. Its arches are 
not so grand ; its associations are not so near and 
dear. But it is so exceedingly beautiful in forms 
and in simpHcity that no one can help loving it ; 
and by reason of certain windings, skilfully devised, 
in its avenues, it is invested with more of the 
alluring attribute of mystery. Some of its asso- 
ciations, also, are especially startling. You may 
there see the chapel in which Mary Stuart was mar- 
ried to her first husband, then Dauphin of France, 
and in which Henry the Sixth, of England, was 
crowned ; and you may stand on the very spot on 
which Napoleon Buonaparte invested himself with 
the imperial diadem — which, with his own hands, 
he placed on his own head. I climbed the tower 
of this famous cathedral, and, at the loftiest attain- 
able height, pictured in fancy the awful closing 
scene of " The Hunchback of Notre Dame." That 
romance seemed the truth then, and Claude 
Frollo, Esmeralda, and Quasimodo were as real 
as Richelieu. There is a vine growino^ near the 



A Glimpse of France. 83 

bell-tower, and some children were at play there, 
on the stone platform. I went into the bell and 
smote upon it witli a wooden mallet, and heard 
with delight its rich, melodious, soulful music. 
The four hundred steps are well worn that lead to 
the tower of Notre Dame. There are few places 
on earth so fraught with memories ; few that so 
well repay the homage of a pilgrim from a foreign 
land. 




IX. 



ENGLISH HOME SENTIMENT. 



npHE elements of discontent and disturbance 
■'- which are visible in English society are 
found, upon close examination, to be merely su- 
perficial. Underneath them there abides a sturdy, 
unshakeable, inborn love of England. These 
croakings, grumbhngs, and bickerings do but 
denote the process by which the body politic 
frees itself from the headaches and fevers that 
embarrass the national health. The Englishman 
and his country are one ; and when the EngHsh- 
man complains against his country it is not be- 
cause he believes that either there is or can 
be a better country elsewhere, but because his 
instinct of justice and order makes him crave 



English Home Setttiment. 85 

perfection in his own. Institutions and principles 
are, with him, by nature, paramount to indi- 
viduals ; and individuals only possess importance 
— and that conditional on abiding rectitude — 
who are their representatives. Everything is done 
in England to promote the permanence and beauty 
of the home ; and the permanence and beauty 
of the home, by a natural reaction, augment 
in the English people solidity of character and 
peace of life. They do not dwell in a per- 
petual fret and fume as to the acts, thoughts, and 
words of other races : for the English there is 
absolutely no public opinion outside of their own 
land : they do not live for the sake of working, 
but they work for the sake of living ; and, as the 
necessary preparations for living have long since 
been completed, their country is at rest. This, 
it seemed to me, is the secret of England's first, 
and continuous, and last, and all-pervading charm 
and power for the stranger — the charm and power 
to soothe. As long as the world lasts England 
will be England still. 

The efficacy of endeavouring to make a country 
a united, comfortable, and beautiful home for all 
its inhabitants, — binding every heart to the land 
by the same tie that binds every heart to the 
fireside, — is something well worthy to be con- 
sidered, equally by the practical statesman and 
the contemplative observer. That way, assuredly, 
lies the welfare of the human race, and all the 



86 The Trip to England. 

tranquillity that human nature — warped as it is 
by sin — will ever permit to this world. This 
endeavour has, through long ages, been steadily 
pursued in England, and one of its results — 
which is also one of its indications — is the vast 
accumulation of what may be called home treas- 
ures, in the city of London, The mere enumera- 
tion of them would fill large volumes. The 
description of them could not be completed in a 
life-time. It was this copiousness of historic 
wealth and poetic association, combined with the 
flavour of character and the sentiment of monastic 
repose, that bound Dr. Johnson to Fleet street, 
and made Charles Lamb such an inveterate lover 
of the town. Except it be to correct a possible 
insular narrowness, there can be no need that the 
Londoner should travel. Glorious sights, indeed, 
await him, if he journeys no further away than 
Paris ; but, aside from ostentation, luxury, gaiety, 
and excitement, Paris will give him nothing that 
he may not find at home. The great cathedral 
of Notre Dame will awe him; but not more than 
his own Westminster Abbey. The grandeur and 
beauty of La Madeleine will enchant him ; but 
not more than the massive solemnity and stupen- 
dous magnificence of St. Paul's. The embank- 
ments of the Seine will satisfy his taste, with their 
symmetrical solidity ;- but he will not deem them 
superior, in any respect, to the embankments of 
the Thames. The Pantheon, the Hotel des 



English Home Sentiment. 87 

Invalides, the Luxembourg, the Louvre, the 
Tribunal of Commerce, the Opera House, — all 
these will dazzle and delight his eyes, arousing 
his remembrances of history, and firing his 
imagination of great events and persons ; but 
all these will fail to displace in his esteem the 
grand Palace of Westminster, so stately in its 
simplicity, so strong in its perfect grace ! He 
will ride through the exquisite Park of Monceau 
— one of the loveliest spots in France — and so 
onward to the Bois de Boulogne, w^ith its sump- 
tuous pomp of foliage, its romantic green vistas, 
its multitudinous winding avenues, its hill-side 
hermitage, its cascades, and its affluent lakes, 
whereon the white swans beat the water with 
their gladsome wings ; but his soul will still turn, 
with unshaken love and loyal preference, to the 
sweetly sylvan solitudes of the Gardens of Kew. 
He will marvel, in the museums of the Louvre, 
the Luxembourg, and Cluny ; and, doubtless, he 
will freely concede that in paintings, whether 
ancient or modern, the French display is larger 
and finer than the English ; but he will still 
vaunt the British Museum as peerless throughout 
the world, and he will still prize his National 
Gallery, with its originals of Hogarth, Reynolds, 
Gainsborough, and Turner, its spirited, tender, 
and dreamy Murillos, and its matchless gems 
of Rembrandt. He will admire, at the Theatre 
Frangais, the somewhat unimaginative and photo- 



88 The Trip to England. 

graphic perfection of French acting ; but he will 
be apt to reflect that Enghsh dramatic art, if 
it often lacks finish, sometimes possesses nature ; 
and he will certainly perceive that the play-house 
itself is not to be compared with either Her 
Majesty's Theatre or Covent Garden. He will 
luxuriate in the Champs Elysees, in the su- 
perb Boulevards, in the glittering pageant of pre- 
cious jewels that blazes in the Rue de Paix and 
the Palais Royal, and in that gorgeous panorama 
of shop-windows for which the French capital is 
unrivaled and famous ; and he will not deny that, 
as to brilliancy of aspect, Paris is prodigious and 
unequaled — the most radiant of cities — the very 
male sapphire in the crown of King Saul ! But, 
when all is seen, either that Louis the Fourteenth 
created or Buonaparte pillaged, — when he has 
taken his last walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, 
and mused, at the foot of the statue of Caesar, on 
that Titanic strife of monarchy and democracy, of 
which France seems destined to be the perpetual 
theatre, — sated with the glitter of showy opu- 
lence, and tired with the whirl of frivolous life, he 
will gladly and gratefully turn again to his 
sombre, mysterious, thoughtful, restful old Lon- 
don ; and, like the Syrian captain, though in the 
better spirit of truth and right, declare that Abana 
and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, are better than 
all the waters of Israel. 



X. 



LONDON NOOKS AND CORNERS. 



'T^HOSE persons upon whom the spirit of the 
-■- past has power — and it has not power 
upon every mind! — are aware of the mysterious 
charm that invests certain famih'ar spots and 
objects, in all old cities. London, to observers of 
this class, is a never-ending delight. Modern 
cities, for the most part, reveal a definite and 
rather a common-place design. Their main ave- 
nues are parallel. Their shorter streets bisect 
their main avenues. They are diversified with 
rectangular squares. Their configuration, in brief, 
suggests the sapient, utilitarian forethought of the 
land-surveyor and civil engineer. The ancient 
British Capital, on the contrary, is the expression 



90 The Trip to England. 

— slowly and often narrowly made — of many 
thousands of characters. It is a city that has 
happened — and the stroller through the old part 
of it comes continually upon the queerest imag- 
inable alleys, courts, and nool^s. Not far from 
Drury Lane Theatre, for instance, hidden away 
in a clump of dingy houses, is a dismal little 
grave-yard — the same that Dickens has chosen, 
in his novel of " Bleak House," as the sepulchre 
of little Jo's friend, the first love of the unfor- 
tunate Lady Dedlock. It is a doleful spot, draped 
in the robes of faded sorrow, and crowded into 
the twilight of obscurity by the thick-clustering 
habitations of men. The Cripplegate church, — 
St. Giles's — a less lugubrious spot, and somewhat 
less difficult of access, is, nevertheless, strangely 
sequestered, so that it also affects the observant 
eye as equally one of the surprises of London. 
I saw it, for the first time, on a grey, sad Sunday, 
a little before twilight, and when the service was 
going on within its venerable, historic walls. The 
footsteps of John Milton were often on the thresh- 
old of the Cripplegate, and his grave is in the 
nave of that ancient church. A simple flat stone 
marks that sacred spot, and many a heedless foot 
tramples over that hallowed dust. From Golden 
Lane, which is close by, you can see the octagon 
tower of this church ; and, as you walk from the 
place where Milton lived to the place where his 
ashes repose, you seem, with a solemn, awe- 



London NooJzs and Cormiers. 91 

stricken emotion, to be actually following in his 
funeral train. The grave of Daniel De Foe, for- 
ever memorable as the author of the great and 
wonderful romance of "Robinson Crusoe," is also 
in the Cripplegate ; and at its altar occurred the 
marriage of Oliver Cromwell. I remembered — 
as I stood there and conjured up that scene of 
golden joy and hope — the place of the Lord Pro- 
tector's coronation in Westminster Hall ; the place, 
still marked, in Westminster Abbey, where his 
body was buried ; and old Temple Bar, on which 
[if not on Westminster Hall itself] his mutilated 
corse was finally exposed to the blind rage of the 
fickle populace. A little time — a very little time — 
serves to gather up equally the happiness and the 
anguish, the conquest and the defeat, the greatness 
and the littleness of human life, and to cover them 
all with silence. 

But not always with oblivion. These quaint 
churches, and many other mouldering rehcs of 
the j)ast, in London, are haunted with associations 
that never can perish out of remembrance. In 
fact, the whole of the old city impresses you as 
densely invested with an atmosphere of human 
experience, dark, sad, and lamentable. Walking, 
alone, in ancient quarters of it, after midnight — as 
I often did — I was aware of the oppressive sense 
of tragedies that have been acted, and misery that 
has been endured, in its dusky streets and melan- 
choly houses. They do not err who say that the 



92 The Trip to England. 

spiritual life of man leaves its influence in the 
physical objects by which he is surrounded. 
Night-walks in London will teach you that, if they 
teach you nothing else. I went more than once 
into Brook street, Holborn, and traced the desolate 
footsteps of poor Thomas Chatterton to the scene 
of his self-murder and agonized, pathetic, deplor- 
able death. It is more than a century [1770], since 
that " marvellous boy " was driven to suicide by 
neglect, hunger, and despair. They are tearing 
down the houses on one side of Brook street now, 
[1877] ; it is doubtful which house was No. 39, in 
the attic of which Chatterton died, and doubtful 
whether it remains : his grave — a pauper's grave, 
which was made in a work-house burial-ground, in 
Shoe Lane, long since obliterated — is unknown; 
but his presence hovers about that region ; his 
strange and touching story tinges its squalour and 
its commonness with the mystical moonhght of 
romance ; and his name is blended with it forever. 
On another night I walked from St. James's 
Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of Cardinal 
Wolsey), over the ground that Charles the First 
must have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. 
The story of the murder of that king, always sorrow- 
ful to remember, is very grievous to consider, when 
you reahze, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and 
death, his exalted fortitude and his bitter agony. 
It seemed as if I could almost hear his voice, as it 
sounded on that fateful morning, asking that his 



LondoJi Nooks and Corners. 93 

body might be more thickl}^ clad, lest, in the cold, 
January air, he should shiver, and so, before the 
eyes of his enemies, should seem to be trembling 
with fear. The Puritans, having brought this 
poor man to the place of execution, kept him in 
suspense from early morning till after two o'clock 
in the day, while they debated over a proposition 
to spare his life — upon any condition they might 
choose to make — which had been sent to them by 
his son, Prince Charles. Old persons were alive 
in London, not very long ago, who remembered 
having seen, in their childhood, the window, in 
the end of Whitehall, through which the doomed 
monarch walked forth to the block. It was lonsf 
ago walled up, and the palace has undergone 
much alteration since the days of the Stuarts ; but 
the spot, in the rear of Whitehall, where the king 
was butchered, is marked to this day, in a man- 
ner most tenderly significant. A bronze statue of 
his son, James the Second, stands in this place. 
It is by Roubiliac (whose marbles are numerous, in 
the Abbey and elsewhere in London, and whose 
grave is in St. Martin's Church), and it is one of 
the most graceful works of that spirited sculptor. 
The figure is slender, elegant, and beautifully 
modelled. The face is downcast and full of grief 
and reproach. The right hand points, with a 
truncheon, toward the earth. It is impossible to 
mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of this 
memorial ; and, equally, it is impossible to walk, 



94 The Trip to England. 

without both thought that instructs and emotion that 
elevates, through a city which thus abounds with 
traces of momentous incident and representative 
experience. 

The literary pilgrim in London has this double 
advantage — that, while he communes with the 
past, he may enjoy in the present. Yesterday 
and to-day are commingled here, in a way that is 
almost ludicrous. When you turn from Roubil- 
iac's statue of James, your eyes rest upon the 
retired house of Disraeli. If you walk past 
Whitehall, toward the Palace of Westminster, 
some friend may chance to tell you how the great 
Duke of WelHngton walked there, in the feeble- 
ness of his age, from the Horse Guards to the 
House of Lords ; and with what pleased compla- 
cency the old warrior used to boast of his skill in 
threading a crowded thoroughfare, — unaware that 
the police, acting by particular orders, were wont 
to protect his reverend person from errant cabs 
and pushing pedestrians. As I strolled, one day, 
past Lambeth Palace, on the road to Dulwich, 
it happened that the palace gates were suddenly 
unclosed, and that His Grace the Archbishop of 
Canterbury — a little, fat, sleek prelate, in black 
garments — came riding forth, on horseback, from 
this Episcopal residence, and pranced away toward 
the House of Lords. It is the same arched gate- 
way through which, in other days, passed out the 
stately train of Wolsey. It is the same towered 



London Nooks and Corners. 95 

palace that Queen Elizabeth must have looked 
upon (and that was the last civic habitation she 
could have seen, upon the Surrey side of the 
Thames), as her barge swept past, on its watery 
track to Richmond. It is forever associated with 
the memory of the great Thomas Cromwell. In 
the church, hard by, rest the ashes of men distin- 
guished in the most diverse directions — Ducrow, 
the equestrian actor; Jackson, the clown; and 
Tennison, the archbishop, the " honest, prudent, 
labourious, and benevolent" primate of William 
the Third, who was thought worthy to succeed in 
office the illustrious Tillotson. The cure of souls is 
sought here with just as vigourous energy as when 
Tillotson wooed by his goodness and charmed by 
his matchless eloquence. Not a great distance 
from this spot you come upon the college afDul- 
wich, that Edward Alleyn founded, in the time of 
Shakespeare, and that still subsists, upon the old 
actor's endowment. It is said that Alleyn — who 
was a man of fortune, and whom a contemporary 
epigram styles the best actor of his day — gained 
the most of his money by the exhibition of bears. 
But, howsoever gained, he made a good use of it. 
His tomb is in the centre of the college. Here 
may be seen one of the rarest picture-galleries in 
England. One of the cherished paintings in this 
collection is the famous portrait, by Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, of Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse — re- 
markable for its colour, and splendidly expositive of 



9^6 The Trip to England. 

the boldness of feature, brilliancy of countenance, 
and stately grace of posture for which its original 
was distinguished. Another represents two re- 
nowned beauties of their day — the Linley sisters — 
who became Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickel. You 
do not wonder, as you look upon these fair faces, 
sparkling with health, arch with merriment, lambent 
with sensibihty, and soft with goodness and feel- 
ing, that Sheridan should have fought duels, for 
such a prize as the lady of his love ; or that these 
fascinating creatures, favoured alike by the Graces 
and the Muse, should, in their gentle lives, have 
been, " like Juno's swans, coupled and insepara- 
ble." Mary, Mrs. Tickel, died first ; and Moore, 
in his " Life of Sheridan," has preserved a lament 
for her, written by Eliza, Mrs. Sheridan, which — 
for deep, true sorrow, and melodious eloquence — 
is almost worthy to be named with Thomas Tickel's 
monody on Addison, or Cowper's memorial Hues on 
his mother's picture : — 

" Shall all the wisdom of the world combined 
Erase thy image, Mary, from my mind. 
Or bid me hope from others to receive 
The fond affection thou alone could 'st give ? 
Ah no, my best beloved, thou still shalt be 
My friend, my sister, all the world to me ! " 

Precious also among the gems of the Dulwich 
gallery are certain excellent specimens of the gentle, 
dreamy style of Murillo. The pilgrim passes on, 
by a short drive, to Sydenham, and dines at the 



Londo7i Nooks and Comers. 97 

Crystal Palace — and still he finds the faces of the 
past and the present confronted, in a manner that is 
almost comic. Nothing could be more aptly repre- 
sentative of the practical, showy phase of the spirit 
of to-day than is this enormous, opulent, and glitter- 
ing " palace made of windows." Yet, I saw here 
the carriage in which Napoleon Buonaparte used 
to drive, at St. Helena — a vehicle as sombre and 
ghastly as were the broken fortunes of its death- 
stricken master; and, sitting at the next table to 
my own, I saw the son of Buonaparte's great de- 
fender, William Hazlitt. 

It was a grey and misty evening. The plains 
below the palace terraces were veiled in shadow, 
through which, here and there, twinkled the lights 
of some peaceful villa. Far away the spires and 
domes of London, dimly seen, pierced the city's 
nightly pall of smoke. It was a dream too sweet 
to last. It ended when all the illuminations were 
burnt out ; when the myriads of red and green and 
yellow stars had fallen ; and all the silver fountains 
had ceased to play. 



XL 



THE TOWER AND THE BYRON MEMORIAL. 



T ONDON, July 15th, 1877. — The Tower of 
-*^^ London is degraded by being put to com- 
monplace uses, and by being exhibited in a com- 
monplace manner. They use the famous White 
Tower, now, as a store-house for arms, and it con- 
tains at this minute 102,000 guns, in perfect order, 
besides a vast collection of old armour and weap- 
ons. The arrangement of the latter was made by 
J. R. Planche, the dramatic author, — famous as 
an antiquarian and a herald. [This learned, able, 
brilhant, and honoured gentleman died. May 29th, 
1880, aged 84 years.] Under his tasteful direc- 
tion the effigies and gear of chivalry are displayed 
in such a way that the observer may trace the 



The Tower a7id the Byron Memorial. 99 

changes which war fashions have undergone, through 
the reigns of successive sovereigns of England, from 
the earliest period until now. A suit of armour worn 
by Henry the Eighth is shown, and also a suit worn 
by Charles the First The suggestiveness of both 
figures is remarkable. In a room on the second 
floor of the White Tower they keep many gorgeous 
oriental weapons, and they show the cloak in which 
General Wolfe died, on the Plains of Abraham. It 
is a grey garment, to which the active moth has given 
a share of his personal attention. The most im- 
pressive objects to be seen here, however, are the 
block and axe that were used in beheading the traitor 
lords, Kilmarnock, Lovat, and Balmerino, after the 
defeat of the Pretender, in 1745. The block is of 
ash, and there are big and cruel dents upon it, which 
show that it was made for use rather than orna- 
ment. It is harmless enough now, and this writer 
was allowed to place his head upon it, in the 
manner prescribed for the victims of decapitation. 
The door of Raleigh's bedroom is opposite to these 
baleful relics, and it is said that his " History of 
the World " was written in the room in which 
these implements are now such conspicuous ob- 
jects of gloom. The whole place is gloomy and 
cheerless beyond expression, and great must have 
been the fortitude of the man who bore, in this 
grim sohtude, a captivity of thirteen years — not 
faihng to turn it to the best account, by produ- 
cing a book so excellent for quaintness, philosophy. 



loo The Trip to England. 

and eloquence. A ridiculous " beef-eater," ar- 
rayed in a dark tunic and trousers trimmed with 
red, and a black velvet hat trimmed with bows 
of blue and red ribbon, precedes each group of 
visitors, and drops information and h's, from point 
to point. " The 'ard fate of the Hurl of Hessex " 
was found to be a particularly fascinating topic 
with one of these functionaries ; and very hard it 
was — for the Hstener as well as the langfuasfe — 
when standing on the spot where that poor gen- 
tleman lost his life, by the mad spite of Queen 
Elizabeth and the treacherous enmity of Raleigh 
and Cecil, to hear his name so persecuted. This 
spot is in the centre of what was once the Tower 
Green, and it is marked with a brass plate, nam- 
ing Anne Boleyn, and giving the date when she 
was there beheaded. They found her body in an 
elm-wood box, made to hold arrows, and it now 
rests, with the ashes of other noble sufferers, un- 
der the stones of the chapel of St. Peter, about 
fifty feet from the place of execution. The ghost 
of Anne Boleyn is said to haunt that part of the 
Tower where she lived, and it is likewise said 
that the spectre of Lady Jane Grey was seen, not 
long ago, on the anniversary of the day of her 
execution [Obt. 1554], to glide out upon a balcony 
adjacent to the room she is beheved to have occu- 
pied, at the last of her wasted, unfortunate life. It 
could serve no good purpose to relate the particu- 
lars of these visitations ; but nobody doubts them 



The Tower and the Byron Memorial. loi 

— while he is in the Tower. It is a place of mys- 
tery and horror, notwithstanding all that the prac- 
tical spirit of to-day can do, and has done, to make 
it common and to cheapen its grim glories. 

The Byron Memorial Loan Collection, which 
was displayed at the Albert Memorial Hall, did not 
attract what, in America, would be considered much 
attention. Yet it was a vastly impressive show of 
relics. The catalogue names seventy-four objects, 
and thirty-nine designs for a monument to Byron. 
The design which has been chosen presents a 
seated figure, of the young sailor-boy type. The 
right hand supports the chin ; the left, resting on 
the left knee, holds an open book and a pencil. 
The dress consists of a loose shirt, open at the 
collar and down the bosom, a flowing neck-cloth, 
and wide, sailor-like trousers. Byron's dog. Boat- 
swain — commemorated in the well-known epitaph, 

" To mark a friend's remains these stones arise, 
I never knew but one, and here he Hes " — 

is shown, in effigy, at the poet's feet. The treat- 
ment of the subject, in this model, certainly deserves 
to be called free, but the general effect of the work 
is finical. The statue will, probably, be popular; 
but it will give no adequate idea of the man. Byron 
was both massive and intense ; and this image is 
no more than the usual hero of nautical romance. 
[It was dedicated, in London, in IMay, 1880]. 

It was the relic department, however, and not 
the statuary, that more attracted notice. The rel- 



I02 The Trip to EnglaJid. 

ics were exhibited in three glass cases, exclusive 
of large portraits. It is impossible, by written 
words, to make the reader — supposing him to 
revere this great poet's genius, and to care for 
his memory — feel the thrill of emotion that was 
aroused, by actual sight, and almost actual touch, of 
objects so intimately associated with the living 
Byron. Five pieces of his hair were shown, one 
of which was cut off, after his death, by Captain 
Trelawny — the remarkable gentleman who says 
that he uncovered the legs of the corse, in order to 
ascertain the nature and extent of their deformity. 
All these locks of hair are faded, and all present a 
mixture of grey and brown. Byron's hair was not, 
seemingly, of a fine texture, and it appears to have 
turned grey early in life. These tresses were lent 
to the exhibition, by Lady Dorchester, Mr. John 
Murray, the Rev. H. M. Robinson, D. D., and 
E. J. Trelawny. A strangely interesting memorial 
was a little locket of plain gold, shaped hke a heart, 
which Byron habitually wore. Near to this was the 
crucifix found in his room at Missolonghi, after his 
death. It is about ten inches long, and is made of 
ebony. A small bronze figure of Christ is dis- 
played upon it, and at the feet of this figure are 
cross-bones and a skull, of the same metal. A 
glass beaker, which Byron gave to his butler, in 
1815, attracted attention by its portly size, and, to 
the profane fancy, hinted that his lordship had 
formed a liberal estimate of the butler's powers of 



The Tower and the Byron Me77iorial. 103 

suction. Four articles of head-gear occupied a 
prominent place in one of the cabinets. Two are 
helmets that Byron wore when he was in Greece, 
in 1824 — and very queer must have been his 
appearance when he wore them. One is light 
blue, the other dark green ; both are faded ; both 
are fierce with brass ornaments, and barbaric 
with brass scales like those of a snake. A come- 
lier object is the poet's "boarding-cap," — a leathern 
slouch, turned up with green velvet and studded 
with brass nails. Many small articles of Byron's 
property were scattered through the cases. A 
corpulent little silver watch, with Arabic numer- 
als upon its face, and a meerschaum pipe, not 
much coloured, were among them. The cap that 
he sometimes wore, during the last years of 
his life, and that is depicted in the w^ell-known 
sketch of him by Count D'Orsay, was exhibited, 
and so was D'Orsay's portrait. The cap is of 
green velvet, not much tarnished, and is sur- 
rounded by a gold band and faced by an ugly 
vizor. The face, in the sketch, is supercilious and 
cruel. A better and obviously truer sketch is that 
made by Cattermole, which also was in this ex- 
hibition. Strength in despair and a dauntless 
spirit that shines through the ravages of irreme- 
diable suffering are the qualities of this portrait; 
and they make it marvellously effective. Thor- 
waldsen's fine bust of Byron, made for Hobhouse, 
and also the celebrated PhilHps portrait — which 



I04 The Trip io England. 

Scott said was the best likeness of Byron ever 
painted — occupied places in this group. - The copy 
of the New Testament which Lady Byron gave to 
her husband, and which he, in turn, presented to 
Lady Caroline Lamb, was there, and is a pocket 
volume, bound in black leather, with the inscrip- 
tion, " From a sincere and anxious friend," writ- 
ten, in a stiff, formal hand, across the fly-leaf. A 
gold ring that the poet constantly wore, and the 
collar of his dog Boatswain — a discoloured band 
of brass, with sharply jagged edges — should also 
be named, as among the most interesting of the 
relics. 

But the most remarkable objects of all were the 
manuscripts. These comprise the original draft of 
the third canto of " Childe Harold," written on odd 
bits of paper, during Byron's journey from London 
to Venice, in 1816 ; the first draft of the fourth 
canto, together with a clean copy of it ; the notes 
to "Marino Faliero ; " the concluding stage direc- 
tions — much scrawled and blotted — in "Heaven 
and Earth ; " a document concerning the poet's 
matrimonial trouble ; and about fifteen of his let- 
ters. The passages seen are those beginning 
" Since my young days of passion, joy, or pain ; " 
" To bear unhurt what time cannot abate ; " and, in 
canto fourth, the stanzas from 118 to 129 inclusive. 
The writing is free and strong, and it still remains 
entirely legible, although the paper is yellow with 
age. Altogether, these rehcs were touchingly sig- 



The Tower and the Byron Memorial. 105 

nificant of the strange, dark, sad career of a wonder- 
ful man. Yet, as already said, they attracted but 
little notice. The memory of Byron seems dark- 
ened, as with the taint of lunacy. " He did strange 
things," one Englishman said to me; "and there 
was something queer about him." The London 
house, in which he was born, in Holies street, 
Cavendish square, is marked with a tablet — ac- 
cording to a custom instituted by a society of arts 
— and that is about all the visible memorial to him 
in London. The houses in which he lived. No. 8 
St. James street, near the old Palace, and No. 13 
Piccadilly terrace, are not marked. The latter is 
now a chemist's shop, while the house of his birth 
is occupied by a descendant of Ehzabeth Fry, the 
" philanthropist." 

The custom of marking the houses associated 
with great names is, obviously, a good one, and 
it ought to be adopted in our country. Two build- 
ings here, one in Westminster and one in the 
grounds of the South Kensington Museum, bear 
the name of Frankhn ; and I also saw memorial 
tablets to Dryden and Burke, in Gerrard street, to 
Mrs. Siddons, in Baker street, to Sir Joshua Rey- 
nolds, in Leicester square, opposite to the Alham- 
bra, to Garrick, in the Adelphi terrace, to Louis 
Napoleon, and to many other renowned individuals. 
The room that Sir Joshua occupied as a studio is 
now an auction mart. The stone stairs leading up to 
it are much worn, but remain as they were when, 



io6 The Trip to England. 

it may be imagined, Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, 
Langton, Beauclerk, and Boswell walked there, on 
many a festive night in the old times. 

It is a breezy, slate-coloured evening in July. I 
look from the window of a London house which 
fronts a spacious park. Those great elms, which 
Birket Foster draws so well, and which, in their 
wealth of foliage and irregular and pompous ex- 
panse of limb, are finer than all other trees of 
their class, fill the prospect, and nod and murmur 
in the wind. Through a rift in their heavy-laden 
boughs is visible a long vista of green field, in 
which some children are at play. Their laughter, 
and the rustle of leaves, with now and then the 
chck of a horse's hoofs upon the road near by, 
make up the music of this summer eve. The sky 
is a little overcast, but not gloomy. As I muse 
upon this delicious scene, the darkness slowly 
gathers, the stars come out, and presently the moon 
rises, and blanches the meadow with silver hght. 
This has been the English summer, with scarce a 
touch of either heat or storm. 




XII. 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



IT is strange that the life of the past, in its unfa- 
mih'ar remains and fading traces, should so far 
surpass the life of the present, in impressive force 
and influence. Human characteristics, although 
manifested under widely different conditions, were 
the same in old times that they are now. It is not 
in them, surely, that we are to seek for the myste- 
rious charm which hallows ancient objects and the 
historical antiquities of the world. There is many 
a venerable, weather-stained church in London, at 
sight of which your steps falter and your thoughts 
take a wistful, melancholy turn — though then you 
may not know either who built it, or who has wor- 
shipped in it, or what dust of the dead is moulder- 
ing in its vaults. The spirit which thus instantly 



io8 The Trip to England. 

possesses and controls you is not one of associa- 
tion, but is inherent in the place. Time's shadow 
on the works of man, like moonlight on a land- 
scape, gives only graces to the view — tingeingthem, 
the while, with sombre sheen — and leaves all blem- 
ishes in darkness. This may suggest the reason that 
relics of by-gone years so sadly please and strange- 
ly awe us, in the passing moment ; or, it may be 
that we involuntarily contrast their apparent perma- 
nence with our own evanescent mortality, and so 
are dejected with a sentiment of dazed helplessness 
and solemn grief. This sentiment it is — allied to 
bereaved love and a natural wish for remembrance 
after death — that has filled Westminster Abbey, 
and many another holy mausoleum, with sculptured 
memorials of the departed ; and this, perhaps, is the 
subtile power that makes us linger beside them, 
" with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." 

When the gentle old angler Izaak Walton went 
into Westminster Abbey to visit the grave of Ca- 
saubon, he scratched his initials on his friend's 
monument — where the record, "I. W., 1658," may 
still be read, by the stroller in Poets' Corner. One 
might well wish to follow that example, and even 
thus to associate his name with the great cathe- 
dral. And not in pride, but in humble reverence! 
Here, if anywhere on earth, self-assertion is re- 
buked and human eminence set at naught. Among- 
all the impressions that crowd upon the mind, in 
this wonderful.place, that which oftenest recurs and 



Westmiftsfer Abbey. 109 

longest remains, is the impression of man's individ- 
ual insignificance. Tliis is salutary, but it is also 
dark. There can be no enjoyment of the Abbey 
till, after much communion with the spirit of the 
place, your soul is soothed by its beauty rather than 
overwhelmed by its majesty, and your mind ceases 
from the vain eflfort to grasp and interpret its tre- 
mendous meaning. You cannot long endure, and 
you never can express, the sense of grandeur that 
is inspired by Westminster Abbey; but, when at 
length its shrines and tombs and statues become 
familiar, when its chapels, aisles, arches, and clois- 
ters are grown companionable, and you can stroll 
and dream undismayed " through rows of warriors 
and through w^ilks of kings," there is no hmit to 
the pensive memories they awaken and the poetic 
fancies they prompt. In this church are buried, 
amidst generations of their nobles and courtiers, 
fourteen monarchs of England — beginning with 
the Saxon Sebert and ending with George the Sec- 
ond. Fourteen queens rest here, and many chil- 
dren of the royal blood who never came to the 
throne. Here, confronted in a haughty rivalry of 
solemn pomp, rise the equal tombs of Elizabeth 
Tudor and Mary Stuart. Queen Eleanor's dust is 
here (who still slays Fair Rosamond in the ancient 
ballad), and here, too, is the dust of the grim 
Queen Mary. In one little nook you may pace, 
with but half a dozen steps, across the graves of 
Charles the Second, William and Mary, and Queen 



no The IVip to Englafid. 

Anne and her consort Prince George. At the tomb 
of Henry the Fifth you may see the helmet, shield, 
and saddle which were worn by that valiant young 
king, at Agincourt ; and close by — on the tomb 
of Margaret Woodeville, daughter of Edward the 
Fourth — the sword and shield that were borne, in 
royal state, before the great Edward the Third, 500 
years ago. The princes whom Richard murdered 
in the Tower are commemorated here, by an altar, 
set up by Charles the Second, whereon the inscrip- 
tion — blandly and almost humourously oblivious of 
the incident of Cromwell — states that it was erected 
in the thirtieth year of Charles's reign. Richard 
the Second, deposed and assassinated, is here en- 
tombed ; and within a few feet of him are the relics 
of his uncle, the able and powerful Duke of Glouces- 
ter, whom so treacherously he ensnared, and be- 
trayed to death. Here also, huge, rough, and grey, 
is the marble sarcophagus of Edward the First, 
which, when opened, more than a hundred years 
ago, disclosed the skeleton of departed majesty, 
still perfect, wearing robes of gold tissue and crim- 
son velvet, and having a crown on the head and a 
sceptre in the hand. So sleep, in jeweled darkness 
and gaudy decay, what once were monarchs! And 
all around are great lords, sainted prelates, famous 
statesmen, renowned soldiers, and illustrious poets. 
Burleigh, Pitt, Fox, Burke, Canning, Newton, Bar- 
row, Wilberforce — names forever glorious! — are 
here enshrined in the grandest sepulchre on earth. 



WesUninsier Abbey. in 

The interments that have been effected in and 
around the Abbey, since the remote age of Edward 
the Confessor, must number thousands ; but only 
about 600 are named in the guide-books. In the 
south transept, which is Poets' Corner, rest Chau- 
cer, Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, Dryden, Beaumont, 
Davenant, Prior, Gay, Congreve, Rowe, Dr. John- 
son, Campbell, Macaulay, and Dickens. Memorials 
to many other poets and writers have been ranged 
on the adjacent walls and pillars ; but these are 
among the authors that were actually buried in this 
place. Ben Jonson is not here, but — in an upright 
posture, it is said — under the north aisle of the 
Abbey ; Addison is in the chapel of Henry the Sev- 
enth, at the foot of the monument of Charles Mon- 
tague, the great Earl of Halifax; and Bulwer is in 
the chapel of Saint Edmund. Garrick, Sheridan, 
Henderson, Cumberland, Handel, Parr, Sir Archi- 
bald Campbell, and the once so mighty Duke of 
Argyle are almost side by side ; while, at a little 
distance, sleep Anne of Cleves, the divorced wife 
of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Neville, the mur- 
dered Queen of Richard the Third. Betterton and 
Spranger Barry are in the cloisters — where maybe 
read, in four little words, the most touching of all 
the epitaphs in the Abbey: "Jane Lister — dear 
child." There are no monuments to either Byron, 
Shelley, Swift, Pope, Bolingbroke, Keats, Cowper, 
Moore, Young, or Coleridge ; but Mason and 
Shadwell are commemorated ; and Barton Booth 



112 The Trip to England. 

is splendidly inurned ; while hard by, in the clois- 
ters, a place was found for Mrs. Cibber, Tom 
Brown, Anne Bracegirdle, and Aphra Behn. The 
destinies have not always been stringently fastid- 
ious as to the admission of lodgers to this sacred 
ground. The pilgrim is startled by some of the 
names that he finds in Westminster Abbey, and 
pained by reflection on the absence of some that 
he will seek in vain. Yet he will not fail to moral- 
ize, as he strolls in Poets' Corner, upon the inex- 
orable justice with which time repudiates fictitious 
reputations, and twines the laurel on only the 
worthiest brows. In well-nigh five hundred years 
of English literature there have lived only about 
a hundred and ten poets whose names survive in 
any needed chronicle ; and not all of these possess 
life, outside of the library. To muse over the liter- 
ary memorials in the Abbey is also to think upon 
the seeming caprice of chance with which the 
graves of the British poets have been scattered far 
and wide throughout the land. Gower, Fletcher, 
and Massinger (to name but a few of them) rest 
in Southwark ; Sydney, Donne, and Butler, in St. 
Paul's ; More (his head, that is, while his body 
moulders in the Tower Chapel), at Canterbury ; 
Drummond in Lasswade church ; Dorset at Wi- 
thiam, in Sussex ; Waller at Beaconsfield ; Wither 
in the church of the Savoy ; Milton in the church 
of the Cripplegate ; Swift at Dublin, in St. Patrick's 
Cathedral ; Young at Welwyn ; Pope at Twicken- 



WeslfjtiJister Abbey. 113 

ham; Tliomson at Richmond; Gray at Stoke- 
Pogis ; Watts in Bunhill-Fields ; Collins at Chi- 
chester; Cowper in Dereham church; Goldsmith 
in the garden of the Temple ; Savage at Bristol ; 
Burns at Dumfries; Rogers at Hornsey; Crabbe 
at Trowbridge ; Scott in Dryburgh Abbey ; Cole- 
ridge at Highgate ; Byron in Hucknall church, near 
Nottingham; Moore at Bromham ; Montgomery at 
Sheffield; Heber at Calcutta; Southey in Cross- 
thwaite church-yard, near Keswick ; Wordsworth 
and Hartley Coleridge side by side in the church- 
yard of Grasmere; and Clough at Florence — whose 
lovely words may here speak for all of them : 

" One port, methought, 

Alike tfiey sought, 
One purpose held, where 'er they fare : 

O bounding breeze, 

O rushing seas, 
At last, at last, unite them there ! " 

But it is not alone in the great Abbey that the 
rambler in London is impressed by poetic antiquity 
and touching historic association — always presum- 
ing that he has been a reader of English litera- 
ture, and that his reading has sunk into his mind. 
Little things, equally with great ones, commingled 
in a medley, luxuriant and delicious, so people the 
memory of such a pilgrim that all his walks will be 
haunted. The London of to-day, to be sure (as 
may be seen in Macaulay's famous Third Chapter, 
and in Scott's " Fortunes of Nigel"), is very little 

8 



114 "^^^^ ^^'^ ^^ England. 

like even the London of Charles the Second, when 
the great fire had destro3'ed eighty-nine churches 
and 13,000 houses, and when what is now Regent 
street was a rural solitude, in which sportsmen 
sometimes shot the woodcock. Yet, though much 
of the old capital has vanished, and more of it has 
been changed, many remnants of its historic past 
exist, and many of its streets and houses are 
frauo^ht with a dehs^htful, romantic interest. It is 
not forgotten that sometimes the charm resides in 
the eyes that see, quite as much as in the object 
that is seen. The storied spots of London may 
not be appreciable by all who look upon them 
every day. The cab-drivers in Kensington may 
neither regard, nor even notice, the house in which 
Thackeray lived and died. The shop-keepers of old 
Bond street may, perhaps, neither care nor know that 
in this famous avenue was enacted the woful death- 
scene of Laurence Sterne. The Bow-street runners 
are quite unlikely to think of Will's Coffee House, 
and Dryden, or Button's, and Addison, as they pass 
the sites of those vanished haunts of wit and rev- 
elry in the days of Queen Anne. The fashionable 
lounger through Berkeley square, when perchance 
he pauses at the corner of Bruton street, will not 
discern Colley Cibber, in wig and rufifles, standing 
at the parlour window and drumming with his hands 
on the frame. The casual passenger, halting at the 
Tavistock, will not remember that this was once 
Macklin's Ordinary, and so conjure up the iron 



Westminster Abbey. 115 

visage and ferocious aspect of the first great Shy- 
lock of the British stage, formally obsequious to his 
guests, or striving to edify them, despite the banter 
of the volatile Foote, with discourse upon "the 
Causes of Duelling in Ireland." The Barbican 
does not to every one summon the austere memory 
of Milton ; nor Holborn raise the melancholy shade 
of Chatterton ; nor Tower Hill arouse the gloomy 
ghost of Otway ; nor Hampstead lure forth the 
sunny figure of Steele and the passionate face of 
Keats ; nor old Northampton Street suggest the 
burly presence of " rare Ben Jonson ; " nor opulent 
Kensington revive the stately head of Addison ; nor 
a certain window in Wellington Street, reveal, in 
fancy's picture, the rugged lineaments and splendid 
eyes of Dickens. Yet London never disappoints ; 
and, for him who knows and feels its history, these 
associations, and hundreds like to these, make it 
populous with noble or strange or pathetic figures, 
and diversify the aspect of its vital present with 
pictures of an equally vital past. Such a wanderer 
discovers that, in this vast capital, there is literally 
no end to the themes that are to stir his imagi- 
nation, touch his heart, and broaden his mind. 
Soothed already by the equable English climate 
and the lovely English scenery, he is aware now 
of an influence in the solid English city that turns 
his intellectual life to perfect tranquillity. He 
stands amidst achievements that are finished, ca- 
reers that are consummated, great deeds that are 



ii6 The Trip to England. 

done, great memories that are immortal : he views 
and comprehends the sum of all that is possible to 
human thought, passion, and labour; and then, — 
high over mighty London, above the dome of St. 
Paul's Cathedral, piercing the clouds, greeting the 
sun, drawing into itself all the tremendous life of 
the great city and all the meaning of its past and 
present, — the golden cross of Christ ! 




-==dSb> 



THE HOME OF SHAKESPEARE, 




[Reprinted from Harper's Magazine, for May, 1879.] 



Others abide our question. Thoii art free. 
We ask and ask : thou smilest and art stilly 
Ottt-toj)ping kjiowledge. For the loftiest hill 
That to the stars ttncro^viis his majesty, 
Plantiiig his steadfast footsteps in the sea, 
Making the heaven of heavens Ids dwelling-place, 
Spares but the cloudy border of his base 
To the foiled searching of mortality. 
And thou, -who didst the stars and sunbeams know, 
Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure^ 
Didst zvalk on earth nnguessed at. Better so ! 
All pains the ijnmortal spirit must endure, 
All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, 
Find their sole voice in that victorious brow. 

— Matthew Arnold. 



XIII. 



THE HOME OF SHAKESPEARE. 



TT is the everlasting glory of Stratford-upon-Avon 
^ tliat it was the birth-place of Shakespeare. In 
itself, although a pretty and charming spot, it is not, 
among English towns, either pre-eminently beautiful 
or exceptionally impressive. Situated in the heart 
of Warwickshire, which has been called "the gar- 
den of England," it nestles cosily in an atmosphere 
of tranquil loveliness, and is surrounded, indeed, 
with everything that soft and gentle rural scenery 
can afford, to soothe the mind and to nurture con- 
tentment. It stands upon a level plain, almost in 
the centre of the island, through which, between 
the low green hills that roll away on either side, 
the Avon flows downward to ancient Gloucester 
and the Severn. The country in its neighbourhood 
is under perfect cultivation, and for many miles 



I20 The Trip to England. 

around presents the appearance of a superbly ap- 
pointed park. Portions of the land are devoted 
to crops and pasture ; other portions are thickly 
wooded with oak, elm, willow, and chestnut ; the 
meadows are intersected by hedges of the fra- 
grant hawthorn, and the whole region smiles with 
flowers. Old manor-houses, half hidden am.ong the 
trees, and thatched cottages embowered with roses, 
are sprinkled through the surrounding landscape ; 
and all the roads which converge upon this point — 
from Warwick, Banbury, Bidford, Alcester, Eves- 
ham, Worcester, and many other contiguous towns 
— wind, in sun and shadow, through a sod of green 
velvet, swept by the cool, sweet winds of the Eng- 
lish summer. Such felicities of situation and such 
accessories of beauty, however, are not unusual in 
England ; and Stratford, were it not hallowed by 
association, though it might always hold a place 
among the pleasant memories of the traveller, would 
not have become a shrine for the homasfe of the 
world. To Shakespeare it owes its renown ; from 
Shakespeare it derives the bulk of its prosperity. 
To visit Stratford is to tread with affectionate ven- 
eration in the footsteps of the poet. To write about 
Stratford is to write about Shakespeare. 

More than three hundred years have passed since 
the birth of that colossal genius, and many changes 
must have occurred in his native town, within that 
period. The Stratford of Shakespeare's time was 
built principally of timber — as, indeed, it is now — 



The Ho7ne of Shakespeare. 121 

and contained about fourteen hundred inhabitants. 
To-day its population numbers upward of ten 
thousand. New dwelHngs have arisen where once 
were fields of wheat, glorious with the shimmering 
lustre of the scarlet poppy. The older buildings, 
for the most part, have been demolished or altered. 
Manufactories, chiefly of beer and of Shakespearean 
relics, have been stimulated into prosperous activity. 
The Avon has been spanned by a new bridge, of 
iron. The village streets have been levelled, swept, 
rolled, and garnished till they look like a Flemish 
drawing of the Middle Ages. Even the Shakes- 
peare cottage, the ancient Tudor house in High 
street, and the two old churches — authentic and 
splendid memorials of a distant and storied past — 
have been "restored." If the poet could walk 
again through his accustomed haunts, though he 
would see the same smiling country round about, 
and hear, as of old, the ripple of the Avon murmur- 
ing in its summer sleep, his eyes would rest on 
scarce a single object that once he knew. Yet, 
there are the paths that Shakespeare often trod ; 
there stands the house in which he was born ; 
there is the school in which he was taught ; there 
is the cottage in which he wooed his sweetheart, 
and in which he dwelt with her as his wife ; there 
are the ruins and relics of the mansion in which he 
died; and there is the church that keeps his dust, 
so consecrated by the reverence of mankind 
"That kings for such a tomb would wish to die." 



122 The Trip to England. 

In shape the town of Stratford somewhat re- 
sembles a large cross, which is formed by High 
street, running nearly north and south, and Bridge 
street, running nearly east and west. From these, 
which are main avenues, radiate many and de- 
vious branches. A few of the streets are broad 
and straight, but many of them, particularly on the 
water side, are narrow and circuitous. High and 
Bridcje streets intersect each other at the centre of 
the town, and here stands the market-house ; an 
ancient building, with belfry-tower and illuminated 
clock, facing eastward toward the old stone bridge, 
with fourteen arches, — the bridge that Sir Hugh 
Clopton built across the Avon in the reign of Henry 
the Seventh. From that central point a few steps 
will bring the traveller to the birth-place of Shakes- 
peare. It is a little, two-story cottage of timber 
and plaster, on the north side of Henley street, in 
the western part of the town. It must have been, 
in its pristine days, much finer than most of the 
dwellings in its neighbourhood. The one-story 
house, with attic windows, was the almost invaria- 
ble fashion of building, in all English country towns, 
till the seventeenth century. This cottage, besides 
its two stories, had dormer-windows above its roof, 
a pent-house over its door, and altogether was built 
and appointed in a manner both luxurious and sub- 
stantial. Its age is unknown ; but the history of 
Stratford reaches back to a period three hundred 
years antecedent to William the Conqueror, and 



The Home of Shakespeare. 123 

fancy, therefore, is allowed the amplest room to 
magnify its antiquity. It was bought, or at all 
events occupied, by Shakespeare's father in 1555, 
and in it he resided till his death, in 1601, when it 
descended by inheritance to the poet. Such is the 
substance of the somewhat confused documentary 
evidence and of the emphatic tradition which con- 
secrate this cottage as the house in which Shake- 
speare was born. The point, as is well known, has 
never been absolutely settled. John Shakespeare, 
the father, in 1564, was the owner not only of the 
house in Henley street, but of another in Greenhill 
street, and of still another at Ingon, about a mile 
and a half from Stratford, on the road to Warwick. 
William Shakespeare might have been born at 
either of these dwellings, and it is not impossible 
that several generations of the poet's worshippers 
have been dilating with emotion in the wrong place. 
Tradition, however, has sanctified the Henley- 
street cottage ; and this, accordingly, as Shakes- 
peare's cradle, will doubtless be piously guarded 
to a late posterity. 

It has already survived serious perils and vicissi- 
tudes. By Shakespeare's will it was bequeathed 
to his sister Joan — Mrs. William Hart — to be 
held by her, under the yearly rent of twelvepence, 
during her life, and at her death to revert to his 
daughter Susanna and her descendants. His sis- 
ter Joan appears to have been living there at the 
time of his decease, in 1616. She is known to have 



124 ^^^ "^^^P ^^ England. 

been living there in 1639 — twenty-three years later 
— and doubtless she resided there till her death, in 
1646. The estate then passed to Susanna — Mrs. 
John Hall — from whom in 1649 it descended to 
her grandchild, Lady Barnard, who left it to her 
kinsmen, Thomas and George Hart, grandsons of 
Joan. In this hne of descent it continued — sub- 
ject to many of those infringements which are inci- 
dental to poverty — till 1806, when William Shake- 
speare Hart, the seventh in collateral kinship from 
the poet, sold it to Thomas Court, from whose fam- 
ily it was at last purchased for the British nation. 
Meantime the property, which originally consisted 
of two tenements and a considerable tract of adja- 
cent land, had, little by little, been curtailed of its 
fair proportions by the sale of its gardens and 
orchards. The two tenements — two in one, that 
is — had been subdivided. A part of the building 
became an inn — at first called " The Maiden- 
head," afterward ''The Swan," and finally "The 
Swan and Maidenhead." Another part became a 
butcher's shop. The old dormer windows and the 
pent-house disappeared. A new brick casing was 
foisted upon the tavern end of the structure. In 
front of the butcher's shop appeared a sign an- 
nouncing " William Shakespeare was born in this 
house. N. B. — A Horse and Taxed Cart to Let." 
Still later appeared another legend, vouching that 
" the immortal Shakespeare was born in this 
house." From 1793 till 1820 Thomas and Mary 



The Home of Shakespeare. 125 

Hornby, connections by marriage with the Harts, 
lived in the Shakespeare cottage — now at length 
become the resort of literary pilgrims — and Mary 
Hornby, who set up to be a poet, and wrote tragedy, 
comedy, and philosophy, took great delight in ex- 
hibiting its rooms to visitors. During the reio^n of 
this eccentric custodian the low ceilings and white- 
washed walls of its several chambers became cov- 
ered with autographs, scrawled thereon by many 
enthusiasts, including some of the most famous 
persons in Europe. In 1820 -Mary Hornby was 
requested to leave the premises. She did not wish 
to go. She could not endure the thought of a suc- 
cessor. "After me, the deluge." She w^as obliged 
to abdicate; but she conveyed away all the furni- 
ture and relics alleged to be connected with Shake- 
speare's family, and she hastily whitewashed the cot- 
tage walls. Only a small part of the wall of the 
upper room, the chamber in which " nature's dar- 
ling " first saw the light, escaped this act of spiteful 
sacrilege. On the space behind its door may still 
be read many names, with dates affixed, ranging 
back from 1820 to 1792. Among them is that of 
Dora Jordan, the beautiful and fascinating actress, 
who wrote it there June 2, 1809. Much of Mary 
Hornby's whitewash, which chanced to be unsized, 
was afterward removed, so that her work of obliter- 
ation proved only in part successful. Other names 
have been added to this singular, chaotic scroll of 
worship. Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Kean, Tenny- 



126 The Trip to England. 

son, and Dickens are illustrious among the votaries 
here and thus recorded. The successors of Mary 
Hornby guarded their charge with pious care. The 
precious value of the old Shakespeare cottage grew 
more and more sensible to the English people. 
Washington Irving made his famous pilgrimage to 
Stratford, and recounted it in his beautiful " Sketch- 
Book." Yet it was not till Mr. Barnum, from the 
United States, arrived with a proposition to buy 
the Shakespeare house and convey it to America 
that the literary enthusiasm of Great Britain was 
made to take a practical shape ; and this venerated 
and inestimable rehc became, in 1847, a national 
possession. In 1856, John Shakespeare, of Wor- 
thington field, near Ashby-de-Ia-Zouch, gave ^2,500 
to preserve and restore It; and within the next two 
years, under the superintendence of Edward Gibbs, 
an architect of Stratford, it was isolated by the 
demolition of the cottages at its sides and in the 
rear, repaired wherever decay was visible, set in 
perfect order, and restored to its ancient self. 

The builders of this house must have done their 
work thoroughly well, for, even after all these years 
of rough usage and of slow but incessant decline, 
the great timbers remain solid, the plastered walls 
are firm, the huge chimney-stack is as permanent 
as a rock, and the ancient flooring only betrays by 
the scooped-out aspect of its boards, and the high 
polish on the heads of the nails which fasten them 
down, that it belongs to a period of reniote antiq- 



The Home of Shakespeare, 127 

uity. The cottage stands close upon the margin of 
the street, according to ancient custom of building 
throughout Stratford ; and, entering through a little 
porch, the pilgrim stands at once in that low-ceiled, 
flag-stoned room, with its wide fire-place, so famihar 
in prints of the chimney-corner of Shakespeare's 
youthful days. Within the fire-place, on either side, 
are seats fashioned in the brick-work ; and here, as 
it is pleasant to imagine, the bo3'-poet often sat, on 
winter nights, gazing dreamily into the flames, and 
building castles in that fairy-land of fancy which w^as 
his celestial inheritance. Nothing else in this room 
detains attention, and you presently pass from it by 
a narrow, well-worn staircase to the chamber above, 
which is shown as the place of the poet's birth. 
An antiquated chair, of the sixteenth century, stands 
in the right-hand corner. At the left is a small 
fire-place, made in the rectangular form which is 
still usual. All around the walls are visible the 
great beams which are the frame-work of the build- 
ing: — beams of seasoned oak that will last forever. 
Opposite to the door of entrance is a three-fold 
casement (the original window) full of narrow panes 
of white glass scrawled all over with names that 
their worshipful owners have written with diamonds. 
The ceiling is so low that you can easily touch it 
with uplifted hand. A portion of it, about a yard 
square, is held in place by an intricate net-work 
of little laths. This room, and, indeed, the whole 
structure, is as polished and lustrous as any waxen, 



128 The Trip to EnglaJid. 

royal hall in the Louvre, and it impresses observa- 
tion very much hke old lace that has been treasured 
up in lavender or jasmine. These walls, which no 
one is now permitted to mar, were naturally the 
favourite scroll of the Shakespeare votaries of long 
ago. Every inch of tlie plaster bears marks of the 
pencil of reverence. Hundreds of names are writ- 
ten here — some of them famous, but most of them 
obscure, and all destined at no very distant day to 
perish where they stand. On the chimney-piece 
at the right of the fire-place, which is named the 
"Actors' Pillar," many actors have inscribed their 
signatures. Edmund Kean wrote his name here — 
probably the greatest Shakespearean actor that ever 
lived — and with what soulful veneration and spir- 
itual sympathy it is awful even to try to imagine. 
Sir Walter Scott's name is scratched with a dia- 
mond on the window — " W. Scott." That of 
Thackeray appears on the ceiling, and close by it 
is that of Helen Faucit. Vestris is written near 
the fire-place. Mark Lemon and Charles Dickens 
are together on the opposite wall. The catalogue 
would be endless ; and it is not of these offerings of 
fealty that you think when you sit and muse alone 
in that mysterious chamber. As once again I con- 
jure up that strange and solemn scene, the sun- 
shine rests in checkered squares upon the ancient 
floor, the motes swim in the sunbeams, the air is 
very cold, the place is hushed as death, and over it 
all there broods an atmosphere of grave suspense 



The Home of Shakespeare. 129 

and hopeless desolation — a sense of some tremen- 
dous energy stricken dumb and frozen into silence, 
and past and gone forever. 

The other rooms which are shown in the Shakes- 
peare cottage possess but few points of special in- 
terest. Opposite to the birth-chamber, at the rear, 
there is a small apartment, in which is displa)-ed 
"the Stratford Portrait" of the poet. This painting 
is supposed to have been owned by the Clopton 
family, and to have fallen into the hands of William 
Hunt, an old resident of Stratford, who bought 
their mansion of the Cloptons, in 1758. The ad- 
ventures through which it passed can only be con- 
jectured. It does not appear to have been valued, 
and although it remained in the house, it was cast 
away amongst lumber and rubbish. In process 
of time it was painted over and changed into a dif- 
ferent subject. Then it fell a prey to dirt and damp. 
There is a story that the little boys of the tribe of 
Hunt were accustomed to use it as a target for their 
arrows. At last, after the lapse of a century, the 
grandson of William Hunt showed it by chance to 
an expert artist, who luckily surmised that a valua- 
ble portrait might perhaps exist beneath its muddy 
surface. It was carefully cleaned. A thick beard 
and a pair of mustaches were removed, and the face 
of Shakespeare emerged upon the canvas. It is 
not pretended that this portrait was painted in 
Shakespeare's time. The very close resemblance 
which it bear.s, in attitude, dress, colours, and other 

9 



130 The Trip to England, 

peculiarities, to the painted bust of the poet in 
Stratford church seems clearly to indicate that it 
was a modern copy of that work. Upon a brass 
plate affixed to it is the following inscription : " This 
portrait of Shakespeare, after being in the posses- 
sion of Mr. William Oakes Hunt, town-clerk of 
Stratford, and his family, for upward of a century, 
was restored to its original condition by Mr. Simon 
Collins of London, and, being considered a portrait 
of much interest and value, was given by Mr. Hunt 
to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, to be preserved 
in Shakespeare's house, 23d April, 1862." There, 
accordingly, it remains, and in memory's association 
with the several other dubious presentments of the 
poet, cheerfully adds to the mental confusion of the 
pilgrim who would fain form an accurate ideal of 
Shakespeare's appearance. Standing in its pres- 
ence, it was worth while to reflect that there are 
only two authentic representations of Shakespeare 
in existence — the Droeshout portrait and the Ge- 
rard Johnson bust. They may not be perfect works 
of art ; they may not do perfect justice to the origi- 
nal ; but they were seen and accepted by persons 
to whom Shakespeare had been a living companion. 
The bust was sanctioned by his children ; the por- 
trait — fourteen times copied and engraved within 
fifty years after his death — was sanctioned by his 
friend Ben Jonson, and by his brother actors Hem- 
inge and Condell, who prefixed it, in 1623, to the 
first foho of his works. Standing amongst the relics 



The Ho7ne of Shakespeare. 131 

which have been gathered into a museum in an 
apartment on the ground-floor of the cottage, it was 
essential also to remember how often '' the wish is 
father to the thought" that sanctifies the uncertain 
memorials of the distant past. Several of the most 
suggestive documents, though, which bear upon the 
vague and shadowy record of Shakespeare's life are 
preserved in this place. Here is a deed, made in 
1596, which proves that this house was his father's 
residence. Here is the only letter addressed to 
him which is known to exist — the letter of Richard 
Ouiney (1598) asking for the loan of thirty pounds. 
Here is his declaration in a suit, in 1604, to recover 
the price of some malt that he had sold to Philip 
Rogers. Here is a deed, dated 1609, on which is 
the autograph of his brother Gilbert, who repre- 
sented him at Stratford in his business aifairs while 
he was absent in London, and who, surviving, it is 
dubiously said, almost till the period of the Res- 
toration, talked, as a very old man, of the poet's 
impersonation of Adam in " As You Like It." Here 
likewise is shown a gold seal ring, found not many- 
years ago in a field near Stratford church, on which, 
delicately engraved, appear the letters W. S., en- 
twined with a true-lover's knot. It may have be- 
longed to Shakespeare. The conjecture is that it 
did, and that, since on the last of the three sheets 
which contain his will the word "seal" is stricken 
out and the word " hand " substituted, he did not 
seal this document because he had only just then 



132 The Trip to Efiglaiid. 

lost this ring. The supposition is, at least, inge- 
nious. It will not harm the visitor to accept it. 
Nor, as he stands poring over the ancient and de- 
crepit school-desk which has been lodged in this mu- 
seum, from the grammar school in High street, will it 
greatly tax his credulity to believe that the " shining 
morning face " of the boy Shakespeare once looked 
down upon it in the irksome quest of his " small 
Latin and less Greek." They call it " Shake- 
speare's desk." It is very old, and it is certainly 
known to have been in the school of the Chapel of 
the Holy Guild, three hundred years ago. There 
are other relics, more or less indirectly connected 
with the great name that is here commemorated. 
The inspection of them all would consume many 
days ; the description of them would occupy many 
pages. You write your name in the visitors' book 
at parting, and perhaps stroll forth into the garden 
of the cottage, which incloses it at the sides and in 
the rear, and there, beneath the leafy boughs of the 
English elm, while your footsteps press " the grassy 
carpet of this plain," behold growing all around 
you the rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, rue, 
daisies, and violets, which make the imperishable 
garland on Ophelia's grave, and which are the fra- 
grance of her solemn and lovely memory. 

Thousands of times the wonder must have been 
expressed that, while the world knows so much 
about Shakespeare's mind, it should know so little 
about his history. The date of his birth, even, is 



The Home of Shakespeare. 133 

established by an inference. The register of Strat- 
ford church shows that he was baptized there in 
1564, on the 26th of April. It is said to have been 
customary to baptize infants on the third day after 
their birth. It is presumed that the custom was 
followed in this instance, and hence it is deduced 
that Shakespeare was born on April 23d — a date 
which, making allowance for the difference between 
the old and new styles of reckoning time, corre- 
sponds to our 3d of May. Equally by an inference 
it is established that the boy was educated in the 
free grammar school. The school was there ; and 
any boy of the town, who was seven years old and 
able to read, could get admission to it. Shakes- 
peare's father, chief alderman of Stratford, and then 
a man of worldly substance, though afterward he 
became poor, would surely have wished that his 
children should grow up in knowledge. To the 
ancient school-house, accordingly, and the adjacent 
chapel of the guild — which are still extant, on the 
southeast corner of Chapel and High streets — the 
pilgrim confidently traces the footsteps of the poet. 
These buildings are of singular beauty and quaint- 
ness. The chapel dates back to about the middle 
of the thirteenth century. It was a Roman Catho- 
lic institution, founded in 1269, under the patronage 
of the Bishop of Worcester, and committed to the 
pious custody of the guild of Stratford. A hospital 
was connected with it in those days, and Robert de 
Stratford was its first master. New privileges and 



134 The Trip to England. 

confirmation were granted to the guild by Henry the 
Fourth, in 1403 and 1429. The grammar school, es- 
tablished on an endowment of lands and tenements 
by Thomas Jolyffe, was set up in association with 
it in 1482. Toward the end of the reign of Henry 
the Seventh, the whole of the chapel, excepting the 
chancel, was torn down and rebuilt under the munifi- 
cent direction of Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of 
London, and Stratford's chief citizen and benefactor. 
Under Henry the Eighth, when came the stormy 
times of the Reformation, the priests were driven out, 
the guild was dissolved, and the chapel was despoiled. 
Edward the Sixth, however, granted a new charter 
to this ancient institution, and with especial precau- 
tions reinstated the school. The chapel itself was 
used as a school-room when Shakespeare was a 
boy, and till as late as the year 1595 ; and in case 
the lad did really go thither (in 1571) as a pupil, 
he must have been from childhood familiar with 
what is still visible upon its walls — the very re- 
markable series of grotesque paintings which there 
present, as in a pictorial panorama, the history of 
the Holy Cross, from its origin as a tree at the 
beginning of the world, to its exaltation at Jerusa- 
lem. These paintings were brought to light in 1804 
in the course of a general repairing of the chapel, 
which then occurred, when the walls were relieved 
of thick coatings of whitewash, laid on them long be- 
fore, in Puritan times, either to spoil or to hide from 
the spoiler. This chapel and its contents, in any 



The Honie of Shakespea7'e. 135 

case, constitute one of the few remaining spectacles 
at Stratford that bring us face to face with Shake- 
speare. During the last three years of his life he 
dwelt almost continually in his house of New Place, 
on the corner immediately opposite to this church. 
The configuration of the excavated foundations of 
that house indicates what would now be called a 
deep bay-window in its southern front. There, 
undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's study ; and through 
that casement, many and many a time, in storm and 
in sunshine, by night and by day, he must have 
looked out upon the grim, square tower, the embat- 
tled stone wall, and the four tall Gothic windows of 
that dark, mysterious temple. The moment your 
gaze falls upon it, the low- breathed, horror-stricken 
words of Lady Macbeth spring involuntarily to your 

lips ; — 

" The raven himself is hoarse 
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan 
Under my battlements." 

New Place, Shakespeare's home at the time of 
his death, and presumably the house in which he 
died, stood on the northeast corner of High Street 
and Chapel Street. Nothing now remains of it but 
a portion of its foundations — long buried in the 
earth, but found and exhumed in comparatively 
recent days. Its gardens have been redeemed, 
through the zealous and devoted exertions of Mr. 
Halliwell, and have been restored to what is 
thought to have been almost their exact condition 



136 The Trip to E7igland. 

when Shakespeare owned them. The crumbling 
fragments of the foundation are covered with 
frames of wood and glass. A mulberry-tree — the 
grandson of the famous mulberry which Shake- 
speare himself is known to have planted — is grow- 
ing on the spot once occupied by its renowned 
ancestor. There is no drawing or print in exist- 
ence which shows New Place as it was when 
Shakespeare left it, but there is a sketch of it as 
it appeared in 1740. The house was made of 
brick and timber, and was built by Sir Hugh 
Clopton nearly a century before it became by 
purchase the property of the poet. Shakespeare 
bought it in 1597, and in it passed, intermittently, 
a considerable part of the last nineteen years of his 
life. It had borne the name of New Place before 
it came into his possession. The Clopton family 
parted with it in 1563, and it was subsequently 
owned by the famihes of Bott and of Underbill. At 
Shakespeare's death it was inherited by his eldest 
daughter, Susanna, wife to Dr. John Hall. In 
1643, Mrs. Hall, then seven years a widow, being 
still its owner and occupant, Henrietta Maria, 
queen to Charles the First, who had come to Strat- 
ford with a part of the royal army, resided for three 
weeks at New Place, which, therefore, must even 
then have been the most considerable private resi- 
dence in the town. Mrs. Hall dying in 1649, aged 
sixty-six, left it to her only child, Elizabeth, then 
Mrs. Thomas Nashe, who afterward became Lady 



The Home of Shakespeare. 137 

Barnard, wife to Sir Thomas Barnard, and in whom 
the direct h'ne of Shakespeare ended. After her 
death the estate was purchased by Sir Edward 
Walker, in 1675, '^vho ultimately left it to his 
daughter's husband, Sir John Clopton, and so it 
once more passed into the hands of the family of 
its founder. A second Sir Hugh Clopton owned it 
at the middle of the last century, and under his 
direction it was repaired, freshly decorated, and 
furnished with a new front. That proved the be- 
ginning of the end of this old structure, as a relic 
of Shakespeare; for this owner, dying in 1751, 
bequeathed it to his son-in-law, Henry Talbot, who 
in 1753 sold it to the most universally execrated 
iconoclast of modern times, the Rev. Francis Gas- 
trell, vicar of Frodsham, in Cheshire, by whom it 
was destroyed. Mr. Gastrell, it appears, was a 
man of large fortune and of equal insensibility. He 
knew little of Shakespeare, but he knew that the 
frequent incursion, into his garden, of strangers who 
came to sit beneath '• Shakespeare's mulberry" was 
a troublesome annoyance. He struck, therefore, at 
the Voot of the vexation, and cut down the tree. 
This was in 1756. The wood was purchased by 
Thomas Sharp, a watchmaker of Stratford, who 
subsequently made the solemn declaration that he 
carried it to his home and converted it into toys 
and kindred memorial relics. The villagers of 
Stratford, meantime, incensed at the barbarity of 
Mr. Gastrell, took their revenge by breaking his 



138 The Trip to England. 

windows. In this and in other ways the clergyman 
was probably made to realize his local unpopularity. 
It had been his custom to reside during a part of 
each year in Lichfield, leaving some of his servants 
in charge of New Place. The overseers of Strat- 
ford, having lawful authority to levy a tax, for the 
maintenance of the poor, on every house in the 
town valued at more than forty shillings a year, 
did not, it may be presumed, neglect to make a 
vigourous use of their privilege, in the case of Mr. 
Gastrell. The result of their exactions in the 
sacred cause of charity was at least significant. 
In 1757 Mr. Gastrell declared that that house 
should never be taxed again, pulled down the 
building, sold the materials of which it had con- 
sisted, and left Stratford forever. A modern house 
now stands on a part of the site of what was once 
Shakespeare's home, and here has been estab- 
lished another museum of Shakespearean relics. 
None of these relics is of imposing authenticity 
or of remarkable interest. Among them is a stone 
muUion, dug up on the site, which must have be- 
longed to a window of the original mansion. This 
entire estate, bought from different owners, and 
restored to its Shakespearean condition, became 
in 1875 the property of the corporation of Stratford. 
The tract of land is not large. The visitor may 
traverse the whole of it in a few minutes, although 
if he obey his inclination he will linger there for 
hours. The inclosure is about three hundred feet 



The Home of Shakespeare. 139 

square, possibly larger. The lawn is in beautiful 
condition. The line of the walls that once sepa- 
rated this from the two gardens of vegetables and 
of flowers is traced in the turf. The mulberry is 
large and flourishing, and wears its honours in con- 
tented vigour. Other trees give grateful shade to 
the grounds, and the voluptuous red roses, growing 
all around in profuse richness, load the air with 
bewildering fragrance. Eastward, at a little dis- 
tance, flows the Avon. Not far away rises the 
graceful spire of the Holy Trinity. A few rooks, 
hovering in the air, and wisely bent on some face- 
tious mischief, send down through the silvery haze 
of the summer morning their sagacious yet melan- 
choly caw. The windows of the gray chapel across 
the street twinkle, and keep their solemn secret. 
On this spot was first waved the mystic wand of 
Prospero. Here Ariel sang of dead men's bones 
turned into pearl and coral in the deep caverns 
of the sea. Here arose into everlasting life Her- 
mione, "as tender as infancy and grace." Here 
were created Miranda and Perdita, twins of heaven's 

own radiant goodness — 

" Daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim, 
But sweeter than the lids of Jmio's eyes 
Or Cytherea's breath." 

To endeavour to touch upon the larger and more 
august aspect of Shakespeare's life — when, as his 



140 The Ti'ip to England. 

wonderful sonnets betray, bis great heart bad felt 
the devastating blast of cruel passions, and the 
deepest knowledge of the good and evil of the uni- 
verse had been borne in upon his soul — would be 
impious presumption. Happily, to the stroller in 
Stratford every association connected with him is 
gentle and tender. His image, as it rises there, is 
of smiling boyhood, or sedate and benignant matu- 
rity ; always either joyous or serene, never passion- 
ate, or turbulent, or dark. The pilgrim thinks of 
him as a ha|Dpy child at his father's fireside ; as a 
wondering school-boy in the quiet, venerable close 
of the old Guild Chapel, where still the only sound 
that breaks the silence is the chirp of birds or the 
creaking of the church vane ; as a handsome, daunt- 
less youth, sporting by his beloved river or roam- 
ing through field and forest many miles about; as 
the bold, adventurous spirit, bent on frolic and 
mischief, and not averse to danger, leading, per- 
haps, the wild lads of his village in their poaching 
depredations on the park of Charlecote ; as the 
lover, strolling through the green lanes of Shottery, 
hand in hand with the darling of his first love, 
while round them the honeysuckle breathed out its 
fragrant heart upon the winds of night, and over- 
head the moonlight, streaming through rifts of elm 
and poplar, fell on their pathway in showers of 
shimmering silver; and, last of all, as the illus- 
trious poet, rooted and secure in his massive and 
shining fame, loved by many, and venerated and 



The Home of Shakespeare. 141 

mourned by all, borne slowly through Stratford 
church-yard, while the golden bells were tolled in 
sorrow, and the mourning lime-trees dropped their 
blossoms on his bier, to the place of his eternal 
rest. Through all the scenes incidental to this 
experience the worshipper of Shakespeare's genius 
may follow him every step of the way. The old 
foot-path across the fields to Shottery remains 
unchanged. The wild flowers are blooming along 
its margin. The white blossoms of the chestnut 
hang over it. The green meadows through which 
it winds are thickly sprinkled with the gorgeous 
scarlet of the poppy. The hamlet of Shottery is 
less than a mile from Stratford, stepping westward 
toward the sunset ; and there, nestled beneath the 
elms and almost embowered in vines and roses, 
stands the cottage in which Anne Hathaway was 
wooed and won. It is even more antiquated in 
appearance than the cottage of Shakespeare, and 
more obviously a relic of the distant past. It is 
built of wood and plaster, ribbed with massive tim- 
bers, — crossed and visible all along its front, — and 
covered with a thatch roof. It fronts eastward, 
presenting its southern end to the road. Under 
its eaves, peeping through embrasures cut in the 
thatch, are four tiny casements, round which the 
ivy twines, and the roses wave softly in the wind 
of June. The northern end of the structure is 
higher than the southern, and the old building, 
originally divided into two tenements, is now di- 



T42 The Trip to England. 

vided into three. In front of it is a straggling 
terrace and a large garden. There is a comforta- 
ble air of wildness, yet not of neglect, in all its 
appointments and surroundings. The place is still 
the abode of labour and lowliness. Entering its 
parlour you see a stone floor, a wide fire-place, a 
broad, hospitable hearth, with cosey chimney-cor- 
ners, and near this an old wooden settle, much 
decayed but still serviceable, on which Shake- 
speare may often have sat, with Anne at his side. 
The plastered walls of this room here and there 
reveal traces of an oaken wainscot. The ceiling is 
low. This evidently was the farm-house of a sub- 
stantial yeoman in the days of Henry the Eighth. 
The Hathaways had lived in Shottery for forty 
years prior to Shakespeare's marriage. The poet, 
then wholly undistinguished, had just turned eigh- 
teen, while his bride was nearly twenty-six, and it 
is often said now that she acted ill in weddinof 
this boy-lover. They were married in November, 
1582, and their first child, Susanna, came in the 
following May. Anne Hathaway must have been 
a wonderfully fascinating woman, or Shakespeare 
would not so have loved her ; and she must have 
loved him dearly — as what woman, indeed, could 
help it? — or she would not thus have yielded 
to his passion. There is direct testimony to the 
beauty of his person ; and in the light afforded by 
his writings it requires no extraordinary penetra- 
tion to conjecture that his brilliant mind, sparkling 



The Home of Shakespeare. 143 

humour, tender fanc\', and impetuous spirit must 
have made him, in his youth, the very paragon of 
enchanters. It is not known where they Hved 
during the first years after their marriage. Per- 
haps in this cottage at Shottery. Perhaps with 
Hamnet and Judith Sadler, for whom their twins, 
born in 1585, were named Hamnet and Judith. 
Her father's house assuredly would have been 
chosen for Anne's refuge, when presently, in 1586, 
Shakespeare was obliged to leave his wife and 
children, and go away to London to seek his for- 
tune. He did not buy New Place till 1597, but it 
is known that in the meantime he came to his 
native country once every year. It was m Strat- 
ford that his son Hamnet died, in 1596. Anne and 
her children probably had never left the town. 
They show her bedstead and other bits of her 
furniture, together with certain homespun sheets 
of everlasting linen, that are kept as heirlooms to 
this day, in the garret of the Shottery cottage. 
Here is the room that must often have welcomed 
the poet when he came home from his labours in 
the great city. It is a very homely and humble 
place, but the sight of it makes the heart thrill with 
a stransre and incommunicable awe. You cannot 
wish to speak when you are standing there. You 
are scarcely conscious of the low rustling of the 
leaves outside, the far-off sleepy murmuring of 
the brook, or the faint fragrance of woodbine and 
maiden's-blush that is wafted in at the open case- 



144 ^^'^ "^f'^P io Engla?id. 

ment, and that swathes in nature's incense a mem- 
ory sweeter than itself. 

Associations may be established by fable as well 
as by fact. There is but little reason to believe 
the old legendary tale, first recorded by Rowe, that 
Shakespeare, having robbed the deer park of Sir 
Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote, was so severely pros- 
ecuted by that magistrate that he was compelled 
to quit Stratford and shelter himself in London. 
Yet the story has twisted itself into all the lives 
of Shakespeare, and whether received or rejected, 
has clung till this day to the house of Charlecote. 
That noble mansion — a genuine specimen, despite 
a few modern alterations, of the architecture of 
Queen Elizabeth's time ^ — is found on the western 
bank of the Avon, about three miles southwest 
from Stratford. It is a long, rambhng, three- 
storied palace — quite as finely quaint as old St. 
James's in London, and not altogether unlike that 
edifice in general character — with octagon turrets, 
gables, balustrades, Tudor casements, and great 
stacks of chimneys, so densely closed in by elms 
of giant growth that you can scarce distinguish it 
through the foliage till you are close upon it. It 
was erected in 1558 by Thomas Lucy, who in 1578 
was sheriff of Warwickshire, and who was knighted 
by Queen Elizabeth in 1593. There is a silly, 
wretched old ballad in existence, attributed to 
Shakespeare, which, it is said, was found affixed 
to Lucy's park gate, and gave him great offense. 



The Home of Shakespeare. 145 

He must have been more than commonly sensitive 
to low abuse if he could really have been annoyed 
by such a manifestly scurrilous ebullition of the 
blackguard and the blockhead — supposing, indeed, 
that he ever saw it. In it he is called a "knight," 
which, in fact, he did not become until at least five 
years after the time when this precious document 
is alleged to have been written. The writing, prof- 
fered as the work of Shakespeare, is undoubtedly a 
forgery. There is but one existing reason to think 
that the poet ever cherished a grudge against the 
Lucy family, and that is the coarse allusion to the 
name which is found in the " Merry Wives of Wind- 
sor." There was, apparently, a second Sir Thomas 
Lucy, later than the sheriff, who was still more 
of the Puritanic breed, while Shakespeare, evi- 
dently, was a Cavalier. It is possible that in a 
youthful frolic the poet may have poached on 
Sheriff Lucy's preserves. Even so, the affair was 
extremely trivial. It is possible, too, that in after 
years he may have had reason to dislike the extra- 
Puritanical neighbour. Some memory of the tradi- 
tion will, of course, haunt the travellers thoughts 
as he strolls by Hatton Rock and through the anti- 
quated villages of Hampton and Charlecote, and up 
the broad leafy avenue to Charlecote House. But 
this discordant recollection is soon smoothed away 
by the peaceful lovehness of the ramble — past 
aged hawthorns that Shakespeare himself must 
have seen, and under the boughs of beeches, limes, 

10 



146 The Trip to England, 

and drooping willows, where every footstep falls on 
wild flowers, or on a cool green turf that is softer 
than Indian silk and as firm and springy as the 
sands of the sea-beaten shore. Thought of Sir 
Thomas Lucy will not be otherwise than kind, 
neither, when the stranger in Charlecote church 
reads the epitaph with which the old knight him- 
self commemorated his wife : " All the time of her 
life a true and faithful servant of her good God ; 
never detected of any crime or vice ; in religion 
most sound ; in love to her husband most faithful 
and true ; in friendship most constant ; to what in 
trust was committed to her most secret ; in wis- 
dom excelling ; in governing her house and bring- 
ing up of youth in the fear of God that did converse 
with her most rare and singular. A great main- 
tainer of hospitahty ; greatly esteemed of her bet- 
ters ; misliked of none, unless of the envious. When 
all is spoken that can be said, a woman so furnished 
and garnished with virtue as not to be bettered, and 
hardly to be equalled of any. As she lived most 
virtuously, so she died most godly. Set down by 
him that best did know what hath been written to 
be true, Thomas Lucy." A narrow formahst he 
may have been, and a severe magistrate in his deal- 
ings with scapegrace youths, and perhaps a haughty 
and disagreeable neighbour; but there is a touch' of 
genuine manhood, high feehng, and virtuous and 
self-respecting character in these lines which in- 
stantly wins the response of sympathy. If Shakes- 



The Home of Shakespeare. 147 

peare really shot the deer of Thomas Lucy, the 
injured gentleman had a right to feel annoyed. 
Shakespeare, boy or man, was not a saint, and 
those who so account him can have read his works 
to but little purpose. He can bear the full brunt of 
all his faults. He does not need to be canonized. 

This ramble to Charlecote — one of the prettiest 
walks about Stratford — was, it may surely be sup- 
posed, often taken by Shakespeare. He would pass 
the old mill bridge (new in 1599), which still spans 
the Avon a little way to the south of the church. 
The quaint, sleepy mill — clad now with moss and 
ivy — which adds such a charm to the prospect, was 
doubdess fresh and bright in those distant days. 
More lovely to the vision, though, it never could 
have been than it is at present. The gaze of 
Shakespeare assuredly dwelt on it with pleasure. 
His footsteps may be traced, also, in fancy, to the 
region of the old college building (demolished in 
1799), which stood in the southern part of Strat- 
ford, and was the home of his friend John Combe, 
factor of Fulke Greville, Earl of Warwick. Still 
another of his walks must have tended north- 
ward through Welcombe, where he was the owner 
of lands, to the portly manor of Clopton. On what 
is called the "Ancient House," which stands on 
the west side of High Street, not far from New 
Place, he may often have looked, as he strolled 
past to the inns of the Boar and the Red Horse. 
This building, dated 1596, survives, notwithstand- 



148 The Trip to England. 

ing some modern touches of rehabilitation, as a 
beautiful specimen of Tudor architecture in one at 
least of its most charming features, the carved and 
timber-crossed gable. It is a house of three stories, 
containing parlour, sitting-room, kitchen, and several 
bedrooms, besides cellars and brew-shed ; and when 
sold at auction, August 23d, 1876, it brought ^400. 
There are other dwellings fully as old in Stratford, 
but they have been newly painted and otherwise 
changed. This is a genuine piece of antiquity, and 
vies with the grammar school of the guild, under 
whose pent-house the poet could not have failed to 
pass whenever he went abroad from New Place. 
Julius Shaw, one of the five witnesses to his will, 
lived in a house close by the grammar school ; and 
here, it is reasonable to think, Shakespeare would 
often pause for a chat with his friend and neigh- 
bour. In all the little streets by the river-side, 
which are ancient and redolent of the past, his 
image seems steadily familiar. In Dead Lane 
(now called Chapel Lane) he owned a little, low 
cottage, bought of Walter Getley in 1602, and only 
destroyed within the present century. These and 
kindred shreds of fact, suggesting the poet as a 
living man, and connecting him, howsoever vaguely, 
with our human, every-day experience, are seized 
on with pecuHar zest by the pilgrim in Stratford. 
Such a votary, for example, never doubts that 
Shakespeare was a frequenter, in leisure and con- 
vivial hours, of the ancient Red Horse Inn. It 



The Home of Shakespeare. 149 

stood there in his day as it stands now, on the 
right-hand side of Bridge street, westward from 
the Avon. There are many other taverns in the 
town — the Shakespeare, the Falcon, the White 
Hart, the Rose and Crown, the old Red Lion, and 
the Cross Keys being a few of them —but the Red 
Horse takes precedence of all its kindred, in the 
fascinating, because suggestive, attribute of antiq- 
uity. Moreover, it was the Red Horse that har- 
boured Washington Irving, the pioneer of American 
worshippers at the shrine of Shakespeare ; and the 
American explorer of Stratford would cruelly sacri- 
fice his peace of mind if he were to repose under 
any other roof. The Red Horse is a rambling, 
three-story building, entered through a large arch- 
way, which leads into a long, straggling yard, adja- 
cent to many offices and stables. On one side of 
the hall of entrance is found the smoking-room and 
bar ; on the other are the coffee-room and several 
sitting-rooms. Above are the chambers. It is a 
thoroughly old-fashioned inn — such a one as we 
may suppose the Boar's Head to have been, in the 
time of Prince Henry; such a one as untravelled 
Americans only know in the pages of Dickens. 
The rooms are furnished in plain and homely style, 
but their associations readily deck them with the 
fragrant garlands of memory. When Drayton and 
Jonson came down to visit "gentle Will" at Strat- 
ford, they could scarcely have omitted to quaff the 
glorious ale of Warwickshire in this cosey parlour. 



150 The Trip to England. 

When Queen Henrietta Maria was ensconced at 
New Place, the honoured guest of Shakespeare's 
elder and favourite daughter, the general of the royal 
forces quartered himself at the Red Horse, and 
then doubtless there was enough and to spare of 
merry revelry within its walls. A little later the 
old house was soundly peppered by the Roundhead 
bullets, and the whole town was overrun with the 
close-cropped, psalm-singing soldiers of the Com- 
monwealth. In 1742 Garrick and Macklin lodged 
in the Red Horse , and hither again came Garrick 
in 1769, to direct the great Shakespeare Jubilee, 
which was then most dismally accomplished, but 
which is always remembered to the great actor's 
credit and honour. Betterton, no doubt, lodged here 
when he came to Stratford in quest of reminiscences 
of Shakespeare. The visit of Irving, supplemented 
with his dehcious chronicle, has led to what might 
be called almost the consecration of the parlour in 
which he sat and the chamber in which he slept. 
They still keep the poker — now marked " Geoffrey 
Crayon's sceptre" — with which, as he sat there in 
long, silent, and ecstatic meditation, he so ruthlessly 
prodded the fire in the narrow, tiny grate. They 
keep also the chair in which he sat — a plain, 
straight-backed arm-chair, with a hair-cloth seat, 
much worn in these latter days by the incumbent 
devotions of the faithful, but duly marked, on a 
brass label, with his renowned and treasured name. 
Thus genius can sanctify even the humblest objects, 



The Home of Shakespeare, 151 

" And shed a something of celestial light 
Round the famiUar face of every day." 

To pass rapidly in review the little that is known 
of Shakespeare's life is, nevertheless, to be im- 
pressed not only by its incessant and amazing liter- 
ary productiveness, but by the quick succession of 
its sahent incidents. The vitality must have been 
enormous that created in so short a time such a 
number and variety of works of the first class. The 
same "quick spirit" would naturally have kept in 
at^itation all the elements of his daily experience. 
Descended from an ancestor who had fought for the 
Red Rose on Bosworth Field, he was born to re- 
pute as well as competence, and during his early 
childhood he received instruction and training in a 
comfortable home. He escaped the plague, which 
was raging in Stratford when he was an infant, and 
which took many victims. He went to school 
when seven years old, and left it when about four- 
teen. He then had to work for his living — his 
once opulent father having fallen into misfortune — 
and he became an apprentice to a butcher, or else a 
lawyer's clerk (there were seven lawyers in Strat- 
ford at that time), or else a school-teacher. Per- 
haps he was all three — and more. It is conjectured 
that he saw the players who from time to time 
acted in the Guildhall, under the auspices of the 
corporation of Stratford; that he attended the relig- 
ious entertainments which were customarily given 
in the neighbouring city of Coventry ; and that in 



152 The Trip to England. 

particular he witnessed the elaborate and sumptuous 
pageants with which in 1575 the Earl of Leicester 
welcomed Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth Castle. 
He married at eighteen ; and, leaving a wife and 
three children in Stratford, he went up to London 
at twenty-two. His entrance into theatrical life 
immediately followed — in what capacity it is impos- 
sible to judge. One dubious account says that he 
held horses for the public at the theatre door; 
another that he got employment as a prompter to 
the actors. It is certain that he had not been in 
the theatrical business long before he* began to 
make himself felt. At twenty-eight he was known 
as a prosperous author. At twenty-nine he had 
acted with Burbage before Queen Elizabeth; and 
while Spenser had extolled him in the " Tears of 
the Muses," the envious Green had disparaged him 
in the " Groat's-worth of Wit." At thirty-three he 
had acquired wealth enough to purchase New 
Place, the principal residence in his native town, 
where now he placed his family and established 
his home, — himself remaining in London, but visit- 
ing Stratford at frequent intervals. At thirty-four 
he was heard of as the actor of Knowell in Ben 
Jonson's comedy, then new, of " Every Man in his 
Humour," and he received the glowing encomium of 
Meres in "Wit's Treasury." At thirty-eight he 
had written "Hamlet" and "As You Like It/' 
and, moreover, he was now become the owner of 
more estate in Stratford, costing him ;^32o. At 



The Ho7ne of Shakespeare. 153 

forty-one he made his largest purchase, buying for 
;^44o the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishop- 
ton, and Welcombe. In the mean time he had 
smoothed the declining years of his father, and had 
followed him with love and duty to the grave. 
Other domestic bereavements likewise befell him, 
and other worldly cares and duties were laid upon 
his hands, but neither grief nor business could 
check the fertility of his brain. Within the next 
ten years he wrote, among other great plays, 
" Othello," "Lear," " Macbeth," and " Coriolanus." 
At about forty-eight he seems to have disposed of 
his shares in the two London theatres with which 
he had been connected, the Blackfriars and the 
Globe, and shortly afterward, his work as we pos- 
sess it being well-nigh completed, he retired finally 
to his Stratford home. That he was the comrade 
of all the bright spirits who glittered in "the spa- 
cious times " of Elizabeth, many of them have left 
their personal testimony. That he was the king of 
them all, is evidenced in his works. The Sonnets 
seem to disclose that there was a mysterious, 
almost a tragical, passage in his life, and that he 
was called to bear the secret burden of a great and 
perhaps a calamitous personal grief — one of those 
griefs, too, which, being germinated by sin, are end- 
less in the punishment they entail. Happily, how- 
ever, no antiquarian student of Shakespeare's time 
has yet succeeded in coming very near to the man. 
While he was in London he used to frequent the 



154 The Trip to England. 

Falcon Tavern and the Mermaid, and he lived at 
one time in Bishopsgate street, and at another time 
in Clink street, in Southwark. As an actor his 
name has been associated with his own characters 
of Adam, Friar Lawrence, and the Ghost of King 
Hamlet, and a contemporary reference declared him 
" excellent in the quality he professes." Many of 
his manuscripts, it is probable, perished in the fire 
which consumed the Globe Theatre, in 1613. He 
passed his last days in his home at Stratford, and 
died there, somewhat suddenly, on his fifty-second 
birth-day. This event, it may be worth while to 
observe, occurred within thirty-three years of the 
execution of Charles the First, under the Puritan 
Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. The Puritan 
spirit, intolerant of the play-house and of all its 
works, must even then have been gaining formida- 
ble strength. His daughter Judith, aged thirty-two 
at the time of his death, survived him forty-six 
years, and the whisper of tradition says that she 
was a Puritan. If so, the strange and seemingly 
unaccountable disappearance of whatever play-house 
papers he may have left behind him at Stratford 
should not be obscure. The suggestion is likely 
to have been made before ; and also it is likely to 
have been supplemented with a reference to the 
great fire in London in 1666 — (which in consum- 
ing St. Paul's Cathedral burned an immense quan- 
tity of books and manuscripts that had been 
brought from all the threatened parts of the city and 



The HoJ7ie of SkaJzespeare. 155 

heaped beneath its arches for safety) — as probably 
the final and effectual holocaust of almost every 
piece of print or writing that might have served to 
illuminate the history of Shakespeare. In his per- 
sonality, no less than in the fathomless resources of 
his genius, he baffles all scrutiny, and stands for- 
ever alone. 

" Others abide our question ; thou are free : 
We ask, and ask ; thou smilest and art still — 
Out-topping knowledge." 

It is impossible to convey in words even an ade- 
quate suggestion of the prodigious and overwhelm- 
ing sense of peace that falls upon the soul of the 
pilgrim in Stratford church. All the cares and 
struggles and trials of mortal life, all its failures, 
and equally all its achievements, seem there to pass 
utterly out of remembrance. It is not now an idle 
reflection that " the paths of glory lead but to the 
grave." No power of human thought ever rose 
higher or went further than the thought of Shake- 
speare. No human being, using the best weapons 
of intellectual achievement, ever accomphshed so 
much. Yet here he lies — who was once so great ! 
And here also, gathered around him in death, lie 
his parents, his children, his descendants, and his 
friends. For him and for them the struggle has 
long since ended. Let no man fear to tread the 
dark pathway that Shakespeare has trodden before 
him. Let no man, standing at this grave, and see- 



156 The Trip to EnglaJid. 

ingand feeling that all the vast labours of that celes- 
tial genius end here at last in a handful of dust, fret 
and grieve any more over the puny and evanescent 
toils of to-day, so soon to be buried in oblivion ! 
In the simple performance of duty, and in the life 
of the affections, there may be permanence and 
solace. The rest is an " unsubstantial pageant." 
It breaks, it changes, it dies, it passes away, it is 
forgotten ; and though a great name be now and 
then for a little while remembered, what can the re- 
membrance of mankind signify to him who once 
wore it ? Shakespeare, there is good reason to be- 
lieve, set precisely the right value alike upon re- 
nown in his own time and the homage of posterity. 
Though he went forth, as the stormy impulses of his 
nature drove him, into the great world of London, 
and there laid the firm hand of conquest upon the 
spoils of wealth and power, he came back at last to 
the peaceful home of his childhood ; he strove to 
garner up the comforts and everlasting treasures of 
love at his own hearth-stone ; he sought an enduring 
monument in the hearts of friends and companions ; 
and so he won for his stately sepulchre the garland 
not alone of glory, but of affection. Through the 
tall eastern window of the chancel of Holy Trinity 
Church the morning sunshine, broken into many- 
coloured light, streams in upon the grave of Shake- 
speare, and gilds his bust upon the wall above it. 
He lies close by the altar, and every circumstance 
of his place of burial is eloquent of his hold upon 



The Hoi7ie of Shakespeare. 157 

the affectionate esteem of his contemporaries, 
equally as a man. a Christian, and a famous poet. 
The line of graves beginning at the north wall of 
the chancel, and extending across to the south, 
seems devoted entirely to Shakespeare and his fam- 
ily, with but one exception. The pavement that 
covers them is of that bluish-gray slate or free- 
stone which in England is sometimes called black 
marble. Beneath it there are vaults which may 
have been constructed by the monks when this 
church was built, far back in the eleventh or twelfth 
century. In the first of these, under the north wall, 
rests Shakespeare's wife. The next is that of the 
poet himself, bearing the world-famed words of bles- 
sing and imprecation. Then comes the grave of 
Thomas Nashe, husband to EHzabeth Hall, the 
poet's granddaughter. Next is that of Dr. John 
Hall, husband to his daughter Susanna, and close 
beside him rests Susanna herself. The grave-stones 
are laid east and west, and all but one present in- 
scriptions. That one is under the south wall, and, 
possibly, covers the dust of Judith — Mrs. Thomas 
Quiney — the youngest daughter of Shakespeare, 
who, surviving her three children, and thus leaving 
no descendants, died in 1662. Upon the grave- 
stone of Susanna an inscription has been intruded 
commemorative of Richard Watts, who is not, how- 
ever, known to have had any relationship with either 
Shakespeare or his descendants. The remains of 
many other persons may perhaps be entombed in 



158 The Trip to England. 

these vaults. Shakespeare's father, who died in 
1661, and his mother, Mary Arden, who died in [608, 
were buried somewhere in this church. His infant 
sisters Joan, Margaret, and Anne, and his brother 
Richard, who died, aged thirty-nine, in 1613, may 
also have been laid to rest in this place. Of the 
death and burial of his brother Gilbert there is no 
record. His sister Joan, the second — Mrs. Hart 
— would naturally have been placed with her rela- 
tives. His brother Edmund, dying in 1607, aged 
twenty-seven, is under the pavement of St. Saviour's 
Church in Southwark. The boy Hamnet, dying be- 
fore his father had risen into much local eminence, 
rests, probably, in an. undistinguished grave in the 
church-yard. The family of Shakespeare seems to 
have been short-lived, and it was soon extinguished. 
He himself died at fifty-two. Judith's children all 
perished young. Susanna bore but one child — 
Elizabeth — who, as already mentioned, became 
successively Mrs. Nashe and Lady Barnard, and 
she, dying in 1670, was buried at Abington. She 
left no children by either husband, and in her the 
race of Shakespeare became extinct. That of 
Anne Hathaway also has nearly disappeared, the 
last living descendant of the Hathaways being Mrs. 
Taylor, the present occupant of Anne's cottage at 
Shottery. Thus, one by one, from the pleasant 
gardened town of Stratford, they went to take up 
their long abode in that old church, which was 
ancient even in their infancy, and which, watching 



The Home of Shakespeare. 159 

throu2;h the centuries in its monastic solitude on the 
shore of Avon, has seen their lands and houses 
devastated by flood and fire, the places that knew 
them changed by the tooth of time, and almost all 
the associations of their lives obUterated by the 
imiDroving hand of destruction. 

One of the oldest and most interesting Shake- 
spearean documents in existence is the narrative, by 
a traveller named Do\vda?ll, of his observations in 
Warwickshire, and of his visit on April 10, 1693, to 
Stratford church. He describes therein the bust 
and the tomb-stone of Shakespeare, and he adds 
these remarkable words: "The clerk that showed 
me this church is above eighty years old. He says 
that not one, for fear of the curse above said, dare 
touch his grave-stone, though his wife and daughter 
did earnestly desire to be laid in the same grave 
with him." Writers in modern days have been 
pleased to disparage that inscription, and to con- 
jecture that it was the work of a sexton, and not of 
the poet ; but no one denies that it has accomplished 
its purpose in preserving the sanctity of Shake- 
speare's rest. Its rugged strength, its simple 
pathos, its fitness, and its sincerity make it felt as 
unquestionably the utterance of Shakespeare him- 
self, when it is read upon the slab that covers him. 
There the musing traveller full well conceives how 
dearly the poet must have loved the beautiful 
scenes of his birth-place, and with what intense 
longing he must have desired to sleep undisturbed 



i6o The Trip to England. 

in the most sacred spot in their bosom. He doubt- 
less had some premonition of his approaching death. 
Three months before it came he drafted his will. A 
little later he attended to the marriage of his 
younger daughter. Within less than a month of 
his death he executed the will, and thus set his 
affairs in perfect order. His handwriting in the 
three signatures to that paper conspicuously exhibits 
the uncertainty and lassitude of shattered nerves. 
He was probably quite worn out. Within the 
space, at the utmost, of twenty-five years, he had 
written his thirt37^-seven plays, his one hundred and 
fifty-four sonnets, and his two or more long poems ; 
had passed through much and painful toil and 
through many sorrows ; had made his fortune as au- 
thor, actor, and manager; and had superintended, 
to excellent advantage, his property in London and 
his large estates in Stratford and its neighbourhood. 
The proclamation of health with which the will 
begins was doubtless a formality of legal custom. 
The story that he died of drinking too hard at i. 
merry meeting with Drayton and Ben Jonson is 
the merest hearsay and gossip. If in those last 
days of fatigue and presentiment he wrote the 
epitaph that has ever since marked his grave, it 
would naturally have taken the plainest fashion of 
speech. Such, at all events, is its character; and 
no pilgrim to the poet's shrine could wish to see it 
changed : — 



The Hoi7te of Shakespeare. i6i 

" Good frend for lesvs sake forbeare, 
To digg the dvst encloased heare ; 
Blase be y^ man y* spares thes stones 
And cvrst be he y' moves my bones." 

It was once surmised that the poet's solicitude 
lest his bones might be disturbed in death grew out 
of his intention to take with him into the grave a 
confession that the works which now "follow him" 
were written by another hand. Persons have been 
found who actually believe that a man who was 
great enough to write " Hamlet " could be little 
enough to feel ashamed of it, and, accordingly, that 
Shakespeare was only hired to play at authorship 
as a screen for the actual author. It might not, 
perhaps, be strange that a desire for singularity, 
which is one of the worst literary fashions of this 
capricious age, should prompt to the rejection of 
the conclusive and overwhelming testimony to 
Shakespeare's genius which has been left by Shake- 
speare's contemporaries, and which shines out in 
all that is known of his life. It is strange that a 
doctrine should get itself asserted which is subver- 
sive of common reason, and contradictory to every 
known law of the human mind. This conjectural 
confession of poetic imposture, of course, has never 
been exhumed. There came a time in the present 
century when, as they were making repairs in the 
chancel pavement of the Holy Trinity (the entire 
chancel was renovated in 1834), a rift was acciden- 
tally made in the Shakespeare vault. Through this, 

II 



1 62 The Trip to England. 

though not without misgiving, the sexton peeped in 
upon the poet's remains. He saw all that was 
there, and he saw nothing but a pile of dust. 

The antique font from which the infant Shake- 
speare must have received the sacred water of Chris- 
tian baptism is still preserved in this church. It 
was thrown aside and replaced by a new one about 
the middle of the seventeenth century. Many 
years afterward it was found in the charnel-house. 
When that was destroyed, it was cast into the 
church-yard. In later times the parish clerk used 
it as a trough to his pump. It passed then through 
the hands of several successive owners, till at last, 
in days that had learned to value the past and the 
associations connected with its illustrious names, it 
found its way back again to the sanctuary from 
which it had suffered such a rude expulsion. It is 
still a beautiful stone, though somewhat soiled and 
crumbled. 

On the north wall of the chancel, above his grave, 
and near to " the American window," is placed 
Shakespeare's monument. It is known to have 
been erected there within seven years after his 
death. It consists of a half-length effigy, placed 
beneath a fretted arch, with entablature and pedes- 
tal, between two Corinthian columns of black mar- 
ble, gilded at base and top. Above the entablature 
appear the armorial bearings of Shakespeare — a 
pointed spear on a bend sable, and a silver falcon 
on a tasselled helmet, supporting a spear. Over 



The Home of Shakespeare. 163 

this heraldic emblem is a death's-head, and on each 
side of it sits a carven cherub, one holding a spade, 
the other an inverted torch. In front of the effigy 
is a cushion, upon which both hands rest, holding a 
scroll and a pen. Beneath is an inscription in Latin 
and English, supposed to have been furnished by 
the poet's son-in-law, Dr. Hall. The bust was cut 
by Gerard Johnson, a native of Amsterdam, and by 
occupation a " tomb-maker." The material is a soft 
stone, and the work, when first set up, was painted 
in the colours of life. Its pecuHarities indicate that 
it was copied from a mask of the features taken 
after death. Many persons beheve that this mask 
has since been found, and busts of Shakespeare 
have been based upon it, both by W. R. O' Donovan 
and William Page. In September, 1746, John Ward, 
grandfather of Mrs. Siddons, having come to Strat- 
ford with a theatrical company, gave a performance 
of '- Othello," in the Guildhall, and devoted its pro- 
ceeds to reparation of the Gerard Johnson effigy, 
then somewhat damaged by time. The original 
colours were then carefully restored and freshened. 
In 1793, under the direction of Malone, this bust, 
together with the image of John Combe — a recum- 
bent statue near the eastern wall of the chancel — 
was coated with white paint. From that plight it 
was extricated a few years ago by the assiduous 
skill of Simon Collins, who immersed it in a bath 
which took off the white paint and restored the col- 
ours. The eyes are painted of a light hazel, the hair 



164 The Trip to England. 

and pointed beard of auburn, the face and hands 
of flesh-tint. The dress consists of a scarlet 
doublet with a roUing collar, and closely buttoned 
down the front, worn under a loose black gown 
without sleeves. The upper part of the cushion is 
green, the lower part crimson, and this object is 
ornamented with gilt tassels. The stone pen that 
used to be in the right hand of the bust was taken 
from it toward the end of the last century by a 
young Oxford student, and being dropped by him 
upon the pavement, was broken. A quill pen has 
been put in its place. This is the inscription be- 
neath the bust : — 

Ivdicio Pylivm, genio Socratem, arte Maronem, 
Terra tegit, popvlvs maeret, Olympvs habet. 

Stay, passenger, why goest thov by so fast ? 
Read, if thov canst, whom enviovs Death hath plast 
Within this monvment : Shakspeare : with whome 
Qvick Natvre dide ; whose name doth deck y^ tombe 
Far more than cost ; sieth all y' he hath writt 
Leaves living art bvt page to serve his witt. 

Obiit Ano. Doi. 1616. ^Etatis 53. Die. 23. Ap. 

The erection of the old castles, cathedrals, monas- 
teries, and churches of England must, of course, 
have been accomplished, little by little, in laborious 
exertion protracted through many years. Stratford 
church, probably more than seven centuries old, 
presents a mixture of architectural styles, in which 
Saxon simplicity and Norman grace are beautifully 



The Home of Shakespeare, 165 

mingled. Different parts of the structure were, 
doubtless, built at different times. It is fashioned 
in the customary crucial form, with a square tower, 
a six-sided spire, and a fretted batdement all around 
its roof. Its windows are Gothic. The approach 
to it is across an old church-yard thickly sown with 
graves, through a lovely green avenue of blossoming 
lime-trees, leading to a carven porch on its north 
side. This avenue of foliage is said to be the copy 
of one that existed there in Shakespeare's day. 
through which he must often have walked, and 
through which at last he was carried to his grave. 
Time itself has fallen asleep in this ancient place. 
The low sob of the organ only deepens the awful 
sense of its silence and its dreamless repose. 
Beeches, yews, and elms grow in the church-yard, 
and many a low tomb and many a leaning stone are 
there in the shadow, gray with moss and mouldering 
with age. Birds have built their nests in many 
crevices in the time-worn tower, round which at 
sunset you may see them circle, with chirp of greet- 
ing or with call of anxious discontent. Near by 
flows the peaceful river, reflecting the grey spire in 
its dark, silent, shining waters. In the long and 
lonesome meadows beyond it the primroses stand 
in their golden banks among the clover, and the 
frilled and fluted bell of the cowslip, hiding its 
single drop of blood in its bosom, closes its petals 
as the night comes down. 

Northward, at a little distance from the Church 



1 66 The Trip to England. 

of the Holy Trinity, stands, on the west bank of 
the Avon, the building which will henceforth be 
famous through the world as the Shakespeare 
Memorial. Its dedication, assigned for the 23d 
of April, 1880, has prompted this glance at the 
hallowed associations of Stratford. The idea of 
the Memorial was first suggested in 1864, incident- 
ally to the ceremonies which then commemorated 
the three-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. 
Ten years later the site for this noble structure was 
presented to the town by Charles E. Flower, one of 
its wealthy inhabitants. Contributions of money 
were then asked, and were liberally given. Ameri- 
cans as well as Englishmen gave large sums. Two 
years ago, on the 23d of April, the first stone of the 
Memorial was laid. The structure comprises a 
theatre, a library, and a picture-gallery. In the 
theatre the plays of Shakespeare are from time 
to time to be represented, in a manner as nearly 
perfect as may be possible. In the library and 
picture-gallery are to be assembled all the books 
upon Shakespeare that ever have been published, 
and all the choice paintings that can be obtained 
to illustrate his life and his works. As the years 
pass this will naturally become the principal de- 
pository of Shakespearean rehcs. A dramatic 
college will grow up in association with the 
Shakespeare theatre. The spacious gardens which 
surround the Memorial will augment their loveli- 
ness in added expanse of foliage and in greater 



The Home of Shakespeare. 167 

wealth of floral luxuriance. The mellow tinge of 
age will soften the bright tints of the red brick 
which mainly composes the building. On its cone- 
shaped turrets ivy will clamber and moss will 
nestle. When a few generations have passed, the 
old town of Stratford will have adopted this now 
youthful stranger into the race of her venerated 
antiquities. The same air of poetic mystery which 
rests now upon his cottage and his grave will diffuse 
itself around his Memorial ; and a remote poster- 
ity, looking back to the men and the ideas of to-day, 
will remember with grateful pride that English- 
speaking people of the nineteenth century, though 
they could confer no honour upon the great name of 
Shakespeare, yet honoured themselves in conse- 
crating this beautiful temple to his memory. 




University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



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